by JuniperMesos | 2025-10-30 19:41:28+00:00
I'm not really sure what point this writer is actually arguing here.

> In short: Wall Street, writ large, has put business fundamentals in a corner and has settled into a kind of cynical vibe-trading in which the goal is always “number go up.”

Yes, the goal is in fact "number go up". The number being the amount of wealth that investors have control over. That is almost the entire point of investing in the stock market. That's the reason anyone is bothering to do so. The only other reasonable justification I can think of for buying or selling stocks is so that you can use your control over the operations of a publicly-traded company to engage in investor activism for a political or social cause you care about - which is a thing some people are interested in doing, but that's a niche, niche concern compared to making the number of dollars you have go up.

Like, what other principle do you think ought to govern how people invest in US financial markets?

> This week, Bank of America analysts said Tesla’s core automotive business represents just 12% of the company’s total value. Robotaxi is 45% and “full self Driving” — Tesla’s autonomous driving software that doesn’t reliably work and customers don’t reliably want to pay for — is 17%. In short: Well over half of the stock’s value lies in products that either don’t yet exist or don’t exist at scale.

Yeah, one of the reasons an investor might buy a company's stock is because they think the company will develop a product that doesn't currently exist or exist at scale, but will eventually do so and then make the company a lot of money, that will ultimately get split with the investor. That's just a thing you do when you make investment decisions. Of course any investor could be wrong about this, but if an investor thinks that Tesla is overvalued they have lots of ways of making money off of this prediction, including but not limited to shorting the stock.

> Tesla’s reward for snoozing on its core product and gambling on a nascent technology with no proof of concept? Its stock is up 75% over the past 12 months, near its record high, and it remains by far the world’s most valuable car company, with a $1.5 trillion market cap. Musk, whose partisan outbursts reportedly cost Tesla one million sales, remains the world’s wealthiest person, and could become the first-ever trillionaire.

Some financial analysts have put forth the theory that one of the reasons Tesla stock has gone up in value so much is because many investors see it as a way to invest in Elon Musk personally. Which seems like a plausible theory to me. Is it a good idea to invest in Elon Musk personally? I have no idea.

I own a small amount of Tesla stock because Tesla is in the S&P 500, and I own a S&P 500 index fund, because I am following the (well-known and easy to find) advice from serious personal finance professionals that this is a good way for ordinary people to invest their money. I have no idea what the price of Tesla should be, and no reason to trust this author's judgement about whether Tesla is overvalued or not compared to any other person's. A major justification for buying broad market index funds is precisely that individual non-specialists like me shouldn't expect to have any better information than the market collectively has, that would allow them to consistently beat the market return in the long term; and attempting to introduces a bunch of idiosyncratic risks that generally lower return.

> Being a naysayer in this market doesn’t pay the bills. Buying the dip does. All those crypto trolls who taunted skeptics to “have fun staying poor” were not, sadly, incorrect (though we can all agree they were jerks). Crypto has not only stayed alive, it’s practically gone mainstream. Even Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon, a longtime critic, has sort of come around, saying earlier this month that blockchain – crypto’s underlying technology — “is real.” > > There is almost no “bad” news that can rattle Wall Street anymore, as investors have learned that buying the dip almost always pays off.

Why is this bad? Why is not not "right"? What state of affairs about how much stocks in the US stock market cost does this author want to be the case? Why is doing the thing that pays the bills bad?