Big Green
When I took a tour of Dartmouth College many, many summers ago, I had a lot of takeaways:
One was, “Wow, there are a lot of trees here!”
Two was, “Wow, we are very far away from a major city!”
And three was, “Wow, having seasonal terms (4) instead of biannual semesters (2) is a really good idea.”
In investing circles, a lot of asset management companies, or whatever you want to call middlemen that handle a lot of other people’s money, usually sell underperforming duds before the end of the year.
In place of the losers, many opt to buy winners that have had a good year so that at year’s end, when they send out statements to their investors, a lot of names on the portfolio look pretty and peachy, even if the return numbers are minimal and misleading.
When I track investments, I do so quarterly, but any mutually exclusive decision to buy or sell is not affected by the calendar.
A major underperformer for me in 2018 has been Cutera ($CUTR), but I will not sell just to chase another company’s positive chart.
As another example, Tesla ($TSLA) has been an underperformer, but for many different, and more public, sometimes comical, reasons.
In Elon Musk’s defense, what the last quarter of sales figures show has been optimism from the free market toward the Model 3:
“Atherton Research estimates that Tesla sold 69,925 Model 3, S, and X vehicles in the US last quarter out of the 83,000 vehicles it delivered worldwide.
In comparison, Mercedes-Benz sold 66,542 passenger vehicles, excluding commercial vans (Freightliner, Metris, and Sprinter), in the US during the same period.
It means that Tesla might have comfortably outsold the German automaker, which has for a long time been seen as the leader in the premium segments.
That said, it was surpassed in the last quarter by BMW, which sold 71,679 vehicles in the US last quarter.
Atherton Research believes that Tesla is on pace to outsell both Mercedes-Benz and BMW in passenger vehicles in the US during the fourth quarter of 2018.”
I’ve only met a select number of Tesla owners over the years in the congested, more walkable city that is New York, but all of them had been overly satisfied.
The production needs to make an automobile is no easy feat, so while I will not buy any automobile anytime soon, I will opt for the next corporate supply chain nightmare: a new phone, Google’s ($GOOGL) Pixel 3:
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