The standard method of determining what industry a company is in is by looking at its underlying business. By that standard, Tesla is clearly in the auto business. Virtually all of the company’s revenues and costs are related to building, selling, and servicing automobiles. But there is another way of checking whether a company is an industry that has implications for investors. The idea is that if two companies are in the same industry, then their stock prices should tend to move together. For example, when the Covid-19 crisis arose, the stocks of all major airlines collapsed together. This raises the question of whether using this second criterion Tesla is in the auto industry. Before turning to the results, a couple caveats are in order.
(more…)Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
Didn’t Feel a THING
T-Day
There are hundreds of companies left to report earnings, but for the most part, today is where it all ends. The “Big Four” of tech all report after the close. They are (including links to their Slope Super Summary page):
- Apple, market cap over $1.6 trillion;
- Amazon, market cap over $1.5 trillion;
- Facebook, market cap 666 billion (of course);
- Google AKA Alphabet, 1 trillion
Since I’m so obsessed with gold, here’s a fun fact: the four companies above, none of which existed 45 years ago, are collectively worth about $10 trillion. The entire gold in the world, including unmined reserves, is only worth about twice that much. In addition, that entirety of known gold, if formed into a cube, would only be 21 meters on each side. Pretty amazing, no?
In any case, here are the charts of the Big Four:
(more…)Pharma Dharma
Yesterday, the New York Times business section had an interesting story about how bio-pharm executives were dumping hundreds of millions of dollars of stock thanks to some well-worded press releases about Covid and “project Warp Speed” (eye roll). I decided to thumb through the SlopeCharts sector germane to this topic and pluck out nine charts I found interesting. Nothing fancy just…………interesting. Here they are.
