The funny thing is the market price is basically group think, right? It’s the consensus of all the active buyers and sellers in the market at any point in time.
So then there’s another groupthink of analysts and financial journalists and message board posters that come to some conclusion about the correctness of that price (e.g. the market has overvalued TSLA). And their groupthink seems more often than not wrong (though I am guessing if you tried to actually identify the groupthink and trade the opposite you also wouldn’t beat the index).
I don’t think this is right. The market price isn’t a consensus. The market always includes some people that think the fair price is higher and some that think it should be lower.
You are right I didn’t use the word correctly. But in general there should not be a groupthink consensus among actual market participants that the price is wrong for any significant period of time because such a thing would cause the price to change.
I guess I don’t quite understand what you mean by group think in this context. My experience has been that “group think” uaually means that there is an almost universal belief that something is true, so that belief is never challenged. I have never seen that kind of group think about the state of the stock market. The value of the index or the trading price of an individual stock is almost almost ALWAYS fiercely debated with many contradictory strong opinions.
There is absolutely group think on the underlying reliability of “the market” to create wealth. It is taken as gospel truth that the market will go up long term, no debate needed. That is more of what I would call group think.
Sorry, this is all kind of pedantic of me and I think that we probably agree on the core point which is that unchallenged assumptions are bad and do exist and can be catastrophic in capital markets. The 2008 financial crisis wouldn’t have happened if people didn’t believe that housing prices couldn’t go down, for example.
FYI, there’s an amazing new conspiracy theory out re: AMC. The story is that somehow AMC secretly issued their APE units in 2020, years before their “official” issuance (as a dividend) in 2022.
[The actual story is that when firms issue stock dividends/splits like this one, all prior-period numbers in subsequent filings are adjusted for those dividends/splits.]
My cruise stonks (the last of my covid recovery stonks) are finally coming back to life. CCL hit around 30 a few months after covid and was at 50 before covid.
I’m in ratchet mode on them now, meaning I keep putting a stop-loss at around -10% as they keep going up. I’m not really into riding them all the way back down. Once I’m out on them I’ll put the proceeds into BRKB.
Alright folks, we’re now officially basically halfway through the calendar year, stonks-wise. Let me have your best and worst individual performers of the year so far!
I will start:
When I first had the idea for this post a couple of weeks ago, I expected to be posting about this bad boy. It has been on an absolute tear this year and, until about a week or so ago, had been my portfolio’s top performer, up a cumulative 36.94% since I bought in, +70.45% in the past 12 months, and 42.25% YTD. Unfortunately, it has hit the skids after tapping its 52-week high last week and is down a bit, though it is up the past two days. MorningStar having it rated as a “Sell” right now also has not helped things:
Butnahh. You know the real answer here, don’t you?
I keep expecting the wheels to fall off any minute now…and it just keeps heading to the moon. I will ride it for as long as I can. It is up cumulatively 39.92% since I got in, and a facemelting 55.09% YTD!
My biggest actual loser so far this year is only my second-biggest loser percentage wise, and since I have a much larger position in this one I will list it here. This is your classic case study in Listen To What Cramer Says And Then Definitely Do Not Do That. This healthcare stonk is off an ugly 26.98% YTD and roughly the same for yours truly, as it was one of the first ones I bought back in early January. The COVID-19 pandemic is “officially” over, which is theoretically great news for the world, but terrible news for owners of this stonk. I think you know where I am going with this.
My absolute worst performer %-wise is this dumb penny stock I threw a few bucks at when I got a bonus a while back. I’ll save the suspense since I am sure you have never heard of it. It is called Ardelyx (ARDX) and they’re supposedly trying to get some drug patented for chronic kidney disease and then it’s off to the moon blah blah blah. Its 52-week range is a silly $5.13-h and $0.5726 low as of this writing, and while YTD it is up a healthy 26.49% (rivaling my GOOGL-A performace), I bought in at exactly the wrong time, apparently; I am down 28.48% since I got in. I guess I will hang on for the ride and see where it lands/crashes.
Brag: My best performer is TTD, closed today at $77/share, +75% YTD. My position was heavily overweight at the beginning of the year and I have not sold any shares since.
Beat: It first hit it’s current price nearly three years ago and I was holding then too.
Brag: I’ve held positions in some form since 2016 when I bought my first set of shares for $2.62 ($26.20 at the time, shares have split 10:1 since).
I was just poking around Merril’s site trying to figure out what I should do with ORCL and see that Larry Ellison just sold a bunch of stock, for the first time in like 2 years. I guess he had some options that were about to expire. My gods just look at this
Oracle’s Larry Ellison Sells More Stock – Barrons.com
June 30, 2023
03:33 PM ETPublished June 30, 2023 03:33 PM Eastern Time
Dow Jones Newswires
Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and current chairman, followed his first stock sales in two years with another large sale.
Oracle stock (ticker: ORCL) has climbed more than 40% this year, thanks to a surge in earnings from artificial- intelligence customers.
On June 23, Ellison used options that he had been awarded earlier to buy 1.75 million Oracle shares for $52.7 million, or $30.11 a share. He then sold the same number of shares that day for $208 million, at an average price of $ 118.79 each.
Ellison’s stock ownership remains at 1.15 billion shares, according to a form he filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. His Oracle stake is more than 40%, making him the company’s largest shareholder.
The stock options had been set to expire on July 1.
Oracle didn’t respond to a request to make Ellison available for comment.
The sales came on the heels of similar transactions between June 20 and June 22 that also saw Ellison exercise stock options, and then sell $640 million of stock. Those were his first sales in two years.
Dude doesn’t even run the company anymore, yet just made a couple sales totaling $848MM + still has 1.15 BILLION shares which are worth $136 billion. JFC
