I would ask you to consider, before making public comments such as this: am I helping to normalize this latest atrocity?
I would guess that wasn't your intention. But to say things like, 'of course' this is happening, because Trump is a pos, is to ignore all the other factors enabling this.
To answer your question: Deporting US children with cancer is not actually something I had predicted.
Had someone asked me if Trump were capable of something like that, I would have said, no doubt.. But would I have thought that the entire system is so irredeemable, so rotted through that he would actually succeed - well, I wouldn't have been as sure. Even after the black sites, the torture, the genocide, the bipartisan concentration camps with children drinking out of toilets and sleeping in foil blankets; I still would have though that there was enough bureaucratic resistance within the system to prevent this happening mere months into the admin.
Would you have thought the US capable of deporting US children with cancer in 2014? ... Do you think the Democrats will put up anything more than token resistance to this?
I believe this too, but I’m also pretty nervous about trying to cash in my beliefs by selling it short or buying put options. The old adage “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” still holds true.
It’s expensive to hold a long term short position against Tesla. Options expire, leveraged ETFs decay, opportunity cost. I’m sure there are some Michael Burray types that are long on short positions but as a retail investor I can’t do it.
The stock has show amazing resilience in face of continuous bad news. To summarise just the recent bad news:
- Sales are down 15% in California
- Cybertruck production has been reduced in Texas due to poor demand
- Two models have been pulled from sale in China
- RoboTaxi delayed again, this will probably never ship
You can write put positions against a short position to have a positive carry short.
It's not an awful approach when a stock already has fear and high volatility. To step it up a notch you can check the ratio of recent implied to realized volatility, and look at option skew (often Puts are extra expensive relative to calls in times of stress) as well as volatility smile shape (far out of the money tail risks can run very expensive in times of stress). All of that is easy for a retail participant, or I should say, anyone expecting to make money from shorting should probably be able to do the "middle school" stuff like this (brokers like ThinkOrSwim will have this info a few clicks/15 seconds away from typing in the ticker).
If you truly know what you are doing, short shops will do things like amplify their exposure and then use software to precisely hedge correlations (short a bank? Long a precise basket of other financials to cancel most of the broad exposure out). For others, the approach above can be nice, because in the case where you are not right about your view but not especially wrong either, the position is just harvesting risk premia which is a proven, core source of return from trading inherent to markets. Of course, if you make a bad bet you're going to get bad results. No avoiding that.
At my age, my mind can’t handle that type of complexity vis-a-vis trading strategies. Options are about as complex as I can tolerate without crowding out other things from my brain. I don’t even hold any single stocks long right now except for my employer’s.
thanks to uBlock origin and pihole I don't see any of them.
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