Elon Musk takes over Twitter

If I was doing a Dumb and Dumber remake (although I don't think they are dumb, I just think they are shits), I'd be looking to cast Elon Musk and Gary Gensler in the lead roles.

 

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I trade things for a living and I do it primarily with derivatives because they allow me to trade with leverage -- which is how I make money. In the case of bitcoin, the only thing I would ever be interested in are bitcoin futures. Each bitcoin futures contract represents 5 bitcoins, so right now one contract has a notional value of about $230,000. But I can control that contract with only $58,000 (give or take) of overnight margin. The difference is what magnifies gains (and losses). The way I make money isn't in guessing price moves, it's in managing that leverage -- not letting magnified losses run away from me, and letting price moves that work in my favor run. It's a bit of a high wire act, but something that has always suited my nature.

So I am not the typical ETF buyer. What these ETFs should do is make bitcoin more easily available to a lot of people. Kind of like when SPY brought the S&P index to people or GLD made it easy for people to buy gold. So I get the excitement in it. More buyers = more demand = all things being equal, prices get bid higher.

As an "investment"? I don't really invest, I more trade the way I was describing and then try to preserve the value of what I earn by finding better ways to hold it than in dollars which are being continually devalued through expansion of the money supply. And I'm not that interested in bitcoin to preserve my purchasing power -- despite its promise. The use case for me would be that unlike fiat currencies, there is a cap on how much bitcoin can be produced. But 1) There is nothing saying that bitcoin -- as opposed to a gazillion other cryptocurrencies -- is ever going to be widely accepted in that role. 2) It hasn't been adopted as a payment mechanism despite a lot of effort to get it to be one, and 3) I can't come up with any utility for bitcoin, OTHER THAN as a speculative vehicle. And my concern with it is that that speculation is way ahead of itself. I prefer hard assets that have some kind of utility beyond. ... "My neighbor made a lot of money buying and selling it." It doesn't mean that I don't think bitcoin might gain widespread adoption, I just don't want to be making bets about whether that happens and how fast.

But if you want to that? I dunno, I'd probably feel more comfortable in a vehicle that has Blackrock or Invesco or Fidelity as the custodian than I would buying bitcoin itself on some shady exchange.

 

Hertz Is Selling Its Fleet Of Rental Tesla Model 3s For Cheap
Tesla Model 3s from Hertz are going for as low as $14,000

FYI. ... Hertz loaded up on Teslas. ... they are finding them expensive to maintain, and nobody wanted to rent them. ... and now apparently they are dumping them on the market.

 

I saw the CEO of Hertz being interviewed about it this morning. A big part of it was collision repair costs, I believe. They were finding that a lot of people were crashing or dinging up the cars and for some reason (which I don't understand) they were finding that it cost twice as much to cosmetically fix the EV than it did a comparable combustion engine car. I believe he was saying that maintenace of the EVs cost less, but between the high cost of replacement components on the cars when they fail and those collision repairs, the offset wasn't enough. Then factor in that rental demand for the Teslas has been more tepid at the higher price point they charge than they anticipated. ... and he was kind of saying, "The market has spoken, and we are adjusting accordingly."

 

In hindsight, the lack of rental demand kind of makes sense to me intuitively. Putting aside the premium you are paying, I can see making a Tesla work for you if you are driving it say, 75 miles a day back and forth to work and to do errands on the weekend. You bring it home, recharge and you are always good to go.

But if you are on vacation or traveling for business and you need a car, you may need more mileage over a short period of time than a single charge is going to give , and for most people, it's easier to find a gas station than it is to figure out where there are charging stations and if they are going to be available and working. Even if you do figure that out, you probably don't want to deal with the time you have to wait for the car to charge up when you are on vacation or traveling for work.

The Hertz CEO was saying that there had been some demand for people who wanted to try out a Tesla, but it wasn't enough to support the fleet they had bought.