Especially a meme stock like tesla

Welcome to the vibe based economy.

It's worse than gambling. When gambling there's risk and reward, but bad bets are still the responsibility of the player just like bets that outperform. In stocks, if someone makes a bet and/or the company misses their expected returns, the gambler can sue the company. It's the only gambling where oops, all losses can still result in payoff for the player by fiduciary class-action lawsuit.

I played meme-stocks in 2020-21. I saw that bullshit first-hand, getting half a dozen emails after quarter misses about suing the company over their failure to meet projections. But half of those companies were just getting fucked with because of the influx of idiots like me doing silly shit with their money! I was blown away by that and suddenly started to see how fucked we were to do anything to stop the cancer that unregulated capitalism has become. Infinite growth, impossible in a finite system, is not only expected, but failure to return positive returns could be met with shareholders suing the company for line not go up high enough reasons.

It's so messed up.

Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it's not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That's the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won't grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that's well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla's P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla's stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn't as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

If the decline was expected, that had already affected the stock price. If you look ONLY at what happens on the day that expectation is finally official, in writing, then yes it’s counterintuitive. But it makes perfect sense that if a huge decline was already built into the price, then that price would rise a little when it’s found out that the decline wasn’t as bad as expected.