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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

The Fed buying bonds isn't pushing Tesla to the 14th largest market cap. It's currently trading $200 per share higher than any analyst recommendation that the WSJ or Yahoo has. Not to mention Hertz, a bankrupt company, has a market cap of 200 million.

Something very unusual is going on.

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They made it easy for the uneducated investor to invest in companies that see the spotlight on the news. You can invest in minutes and for free now, right from your phone. These people don't do any research on the company. They see news stories on the company all the time, and news stories that the stock went up XX% So when you have people casually buying stocks I feel like they get inflated past the point that makes any sense, and thus become incredibly overvalued. Seasoned investors would see this and stay far, far away from these businesses.

Is there recent data on how much investment originates from retail investors? Are there really enough retail investors on Robinhood and elsewhere to push valuations up this high?

That's a good question. My statement was opinion and speculation, but it would be interesting to see this backed up by data, maybe someone here can find data on percentage of a stock like TSLA for example is held by retail investors?

You can see the % of shares held by institutions

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/key-statistics?p=TSLA

Compare Tesla at 57.93% to Ford at 55.06%

I don't have the link but I think people linked Hertz' valuation pop after it's bankruptcy almost exclusively on Robinhood type traders.

9.5% of float shorted, up 13% mid-day. Short squeeze, methinks.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla

Here is the Volkswagen stock chart from October 2008:

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...

Of course it's a short squeeze

... and, two hours later, back down to +1%, still mid-day.

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