Investment BS Thread - Stocks/Futures/Mutual Funds/Bonds/Commodities/Options/ETFs/401ks/Etc

funny how barely 6 trading days gets it that far

 

The drop is always so much faster than the climb. A trade deal announcement is going to make for a crazy chart when it happens now that we’ve gone down.

 

At this point the Chinese are probably just going to stall until 2020. After that, if Trump wins they're going to be in big trouble lol

 

Market goes down, alcohol and entertainment go up. Important to keep that in mind with doom and gloom stuff like tariffs lingering

 

When everybody is panicking buy buy buy

 

What we buying today boys? Apple? John Deere?

 

Bought some square yesterday, we will see what happens!

 

That stock has been range-bound for a long time. I think you can either trade in and out of it and probably make some money. Or, hold for a few decades and hope the company is successful. I think it's a great company, just hope they run it well.

 

I've been bouncing in and out of UBER for a couple days now waiting for this afternoon to happen. Lucky I was in when it did. I don't think I'll carry as much as I am holding now long term, but I am keeping some for the long haul for sure. Here is my opinion on it long term (note, just my opinion, not advice etc.).

Look at the past few year's financials, the COGS and SG&A is getting better as a percentage as revenue grows. Presumably that will continue, especially in the SG&A department. I don't see growth as an issue. There is a TON of growth left in the ride share market, and Uber is positioned to soak most of that up. With Uber's major owners, and current brand power, I don't see another entity coming in and dethroning them. Rising revenue, lower COGS (relatively) and SG&A (relatively), profit. I think they are profitable in 2021 or 2022. That is the actual investing part.

Here is the speculative moon shot part. The biggest issue in COGS for Uber is that they have to pay people for their time and their car. Autonomous vehicles will be here in 10 years. 1 of 2 things can happen. 1 People buy cars like they do now and send their car on rides for Uber, just like now, but without them. 2 Uber will have its own fleet of autonomous vehicles to taxi people around. Uber is already working on autonomous vehicles. Either way worst thing for Uber that can come of it is that rides will be cheaper and their margins won't change. Even in that worst case scenario though, the rides will be so cheap that households can cut to 1 car and some even to 0, and just Uber everywhere, saving money the whole way. The ride share market explodes in that case, and Uber rakes it in. I think it is more likely that the rides will be significantly cheaper, but the margins will still improve, which is even better.

Uber isn't just disrupting taxis, they created a market for food delivery, they are about to disrupt the local same-day parcel delivery market, they are already disrupting the consumer auto purchasing market (some kids don't even want to get driver's licenses now. Seriously, look it up.), and they will most likely absolutely destroy the consumer auto purchasing market in 10 years.

As far as valuation goes, I built a model that makes me believe that today's valuation is reasonable, even on the cheap side. I could have had confirmation bias though. Toyota bought in at a 76 billion valuation, pay pal bought in at about 75.6 billion. Today it is at about 67 billion. Those companies have entire departments that looked at the valuation, so reasonable can't be too far off.

I might just be on a high from today's gains, I will continue to evaluate as time goes on, but...

 

I read some stuff about the autonomous driving that Tesla and Uber (and many others) are pushing for. What I read was interesting. How does the autonomous car make a split second decision on what to hit (when there’s no choice), the deer or the biker? Does it swerve to miss the rabbit and go into oncoming traffic, or run the rabbit over? How about a little kid? I don’t want to say that it will never happen, but I have a hard time imagining a fully autonomous car successfully navigating a public road, I just don’t see it.

 

same. it will be tough to distinguish between many of those things.

 

For practical purposes, the technology will be so good that it won't matter what decision it makes, it will still be 100x safer than a human driver and will be far less likely to be in a bad situation than a human driver. Think of all the deaths caused by poor human judgement on the road, computers will be immensely safer. Many companies are already testing on public roads, Waymo being the primary (Waymo owned by Google). Their track record is pretty good so far, but there have been a few accidents. Uber killed a pedestrian actually. I suppose it depends on how you look at it as to whether it is worth it. Even before my investment I think it is worth it because it will save far far more lives than it will cost.

 

I don’t doubt they’re driving them around and using analytics and compiling data to figure out the rabbit, deer, kid situation. I am old fashion, set in my ways, so maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I just don’t see it though, too many variables that humans can account for but computers can’t. Just my opinion, hopefully your investment does well. I just started a position in Ford if you want to see how old fashion I am.

 

Ford is actually researching pretty heavily in self driving tech also, especially in Michigan with snow which adds a whole extra set of variables to account for (no lines on the road)

 

I wish I had some funds to go buy some more target- Seems like that is a lesson I am seeing- keep some liquidity in the account- you cant buy the dip if you dont have the cash.

 

I was up about 20% in TGT a month or so ago, now up 2%. No idea what happened, but the yield sure is nice now!

 

I sold my small stake in my play account a month or so ago- The trade spook seems to be driving this however Target is not sole sourced into China like a dollar store. They are still doing real well in the segment and I wouldnt mind jumping back in.

 

I think just about every company (auto and others) is doing some sort of research in that area. That's definitely not why I started a position in Ford though. I like the valuation right now, great F-150 sales, and dividend that will pay me for years to wait for the price to go up!