This post is inspired by what Chin Hui Leong of The Smart Investor posted on Threads.
View on Threads
He compared the price returns of the Magnificent 7 (Mag-7) stocks from the last NASDAQ peak on 19 Nov 2021 to 9 Nov 2024. As you can see from his post, NVIDIA delivered a superb return of 347% (the highest) and Tesla delivered a return of -15% (the lowest).
This was a surprise to me. I'm not a keen follower of the Mag-7, although I hold a little bit of Microsoft. At first glance, the returns do not appear all that high over 3 years, for Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.
Rolling in the dough
Tesla in particular delivered a negative return. Now if someone had bought Tesla at IPO, based on the IPO price of 1.28 and the all-time-high of 407.36 (1 Nov 2021) they would have earned a whopping return of 31,725%
Yes, you read that right. 31,725%. This means if somebody had invested USD 10,000 at IPO, they would have roughly 3 million dollars if they had sold at that price.
Buy it at a high
If an investor had bought it at that all-time-high price however, the results would be a lot more uncertain. The stock price is certainly volatile. From Nov 2021 until now, it vacillated between just over USD 100 to over USD 300.
If you know how to trade the stock around the volatility, you would probably have done well (hopefully).
This is probably related to the fluctuating fortunes of the company and its majority owner Elon Musk He is the subject of a number of controversies and he is not shy about attracting them.
Why the joy?
Since the US election on 5th Nov, Tesla stock is on the rise again. From 4th Nov 2024 (before the election on 5th Nov), the price of Tesla hit a high of USD 350 on 11 Nov 2024, giving a return of 44.13%, before dipping a little to 320.72 on 15 Nov 2024.
The spike is probably due to the election of Donald Trump, with whom Elon Musk has allied. He had bet successfully on Trump's election and I guess investors in Tesla are expecting something in return? It is unclear what but Electrek certainly thinks there are reasons. The title of their article hints at it. It's subtle. Take a look and see if you can guess correctly.
All this is very uncertain, and some people are predicting that it is hard for Musk to stay in the incoming President's good graces forever.
Buy and hold
What if an investor bought the stock at the all-time-high on 1 Nov 2021and held it to today? Even with the post-election spike, the buy-and-hold investor would be sitting on a loss.
In fact, if the investor had been bought a "stodgy" local bank like OCBC or UOB, they would have outperformed Tesla.
OCBC and UOB are favoured by some Singapore investors because they are steady dividend payers. Comparing the total returns from 1 Nov 2021 to 15 Nov 2024, with dividends re-invested, the underperformance of Tesla is even more acute.
Why not all 3?
So buying Tesla at the all-time-high was a dangerous move.
Many critics of Tesla and Elon Musk expect him to fail, but he succeeds again and again. So what if an investor is a Musk fan and hopes that the modern day Wizard of Oz will pull it off, but finds the volatility a little hard to stomach?
I'm not a fan of Tesla or Elon Musk but I am a fan of diversification. Imagine if an investor invested 10,000 dollars into each of these 3 stocks on 1 Nov 2021 and held until now.
Using the "stodgy" banks and re-investing the dividends received to even out the volatility of Tesla might work.
As usual, your mileage may vary and not investment advice.
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