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Comment by ncavig | Hacker News Reader

This might be a stupid question, but as a Tesla stock owner, and (becoming more apparent ever day) naive investor, how do you find out this information and/or digest it so well? I'm mainly a google finance guy and had no idea so much of the stock was being shorted.

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I own ~95% index funds, which makes most of my research pretty easy. For the individual stocks I do own, I like to follow the analysis on Reuters. Even just spending an hour/week reading the latest news does wonders.

For Tesla: http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyNews?symbol=TSL...

Investing around a short squeeze is out of your control, and I would argue, not worth worrying about. The price will bounce around like crazy and some people will make 30% in a day while others lose much more than that, but in the end, Tesla's price will reflect their ability to turn a profit in the future.

If you feel like the future market cap of Tesla is larger than it is today (with all the usual time-value-of-money caveats), keep your money invested and don't waste your time fretting over the mayhem on Wall St.

Forgive the unsolicited advice, but I think that's the wrong question. First ask yourself what you'd do with that information. Then think long and hard about indexing your money.

Read up on portfolio theory and you will see that it's incredibly difficult (some say impossible) to beat the risk adjusted return of the market (at least not on purpose). It turns out if you are not in many stocks - 40+ (the exact number depends on who you ask), then you are taking more risk than you are being compensated for.

FWIW I do have a strong majority of portfolio dedicated to index funds, and have automatic investing set up for those funds biweekly. But there do come times where I see a company, and after some due diligence I do see as a company I believe in and see prospering in the long. Tesla is one of those companies so I bought a fair amount 2 months ago.

Regardless of solicited or not, I do agree with your advice and if nothing else, hopefully readers who fear to ask such questions gain from friendly advice such as yours

EDIT: grammar

I do the same thing in my IRA. Right now TSLA is the only individual stock I own, and it is a bit less than 10% of my account value. I bought it at $29 per share 9 months ago or so, knowing I might take a bath, but I believed in the company's long term business model then and I still do. I feel that this kind of investing minimizes the risk factor.

The only theoretically better option than an index fund is to go fully random assuming a low enough transaction costs.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TSLA+Key+Statistics

Usually data from there is just parsed from the variety of forms that a public company has to file with the SEC, all/most of which are available to the public via a tool they have called EDGAR. Here's Tesla's filings: http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany...

EDIT: also, congratulations :) ask a real professional, but if you're tempted to sell be aware your holding period and of the tax difference between long and short term capital gains. Also, if you want to sell tomorrow and re-buy, be aware of wash sale rules.

I am also a novice investor, but the # of shares that are short are actually listed on the details pages of many online stock sites, for example: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TSLA+Key+Statistics

Shares Short (as of Apr 15, 2013): 30.70M

Shares Outstanding: 114.52M

EDIT - I guess this is more relevant:

Short % of Float (as of Apr 15, 2013)3: 49.20%

EDIT #2: Congrats on the gains today! :-)

The cynical answer is that you specialize in post-hoc analysis like this. Predictions, after all, can be wrong. :)

This is true in general obviously, but investing specifically is filled with explanations like this that make sense only in hindsight.

I completely agree in most cases, however the Reuters article I linked was written earlier this week. Some market conditions necessitate a big swing in prices -- though guessing which direction prices will swing can be tricky.

If you wanted de-risk your position, you could set up an option straddle or just sell your shares before the announcement and then buy them again next week.

Also don't forget - by the time you read the news about a company, the news has already affected the stock price (in the short term).

So in other words if you read big news the minute it comes out about a company, automated systems and institutional traders have already made their moves based on the news before retail investors have a chance.

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