Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 533 posts

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#51

Post by PragmaticPulp »

imglorp wrote: post #28
raesene9 wrote: post #19

Interesting how even after this was announced, their market cap is over $5b ( https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NKLA:NASDAQ ) in the same ballpark as established car companies like Mazda ( https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MZDAF:OTCMKTS )

What? How? Is there any potential upside at all, unless it's another pump and dump or short squeeze game?

I also think it’s overvalued, but the company distanced itself from the criminal founder long ago.

The company also has about 3/4 of a billion dollars in the bank. It’s basically an extremely well funded startup with a bit of a head start on the EV market at this point.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#53

Post by chasebank »

shawnz wrote: post #41
chasebank wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Older I get, more I realize the market is just a game of human psychology. Stocks, housing, crypto, etc. History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly but this time, who knows? If you happen to have the answer, I'm all ears.

> History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly Does it? If you look past the biggest scams and bubbles, I think most research shows that a moderate amount of speculation actually decreases volatility and makes market manipulation more difficult. Speculators after all are the ones who correct the prices of assets which are being wrongly valued.

Copy / paste from elsewhere but here's a recent list of speculative investing bubbles and their outcomes:

The Japanese Nikkei is still down 40% from 1989. That was 31 years ago. The Shanghai Composite index is down 45% from 2007. That was 13 years ago. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index is down 10% from the peak in 2007. The German DAX is a “total return” index that includes dividends. So it cannot be compared to the other indices here, or to the S&P 500. The German index that is not a total return index and therefore can be compared to the S&P 500 is the DAXK. Despite its red-hot surge in recent months, it’s still down 8% from the peak in the year 2000. That was twenty years ago. The London stock exchange index FTSE is down 13% from 1999. 21 years ago. The Italian stock index, the FTSE MIB, is down about 60% from the year 2000. 20 years ago. The French stock index, the CAC40, is down 24% from its peak in the year 2000. 20 years ago. The Spanish stock index IBEX 35 is down 58% from its peak in 2007, which was the peak of the Spanish housing bubble that collapsed with devastating results 12 years ago.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#55

Post by fastball »

bornelsewhere wrote: post #52

Nikola is one of Crystal lang largest sponsors[0]. I wonder if this is going to have repercussions. It's no fault of the Crystal community but might cast a shadow nevertheless. [0] https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/

Using fraud to support interesting open source work – I'm kinda conflicted.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#56

Post by zippergz »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #51
imglorp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? How? Is there any potential upside at all, unless it's another pump and dump or short squeeze game?

I also think it’s overvalued, but the company distanced itself from the criminal founder long ago. The company also has about 3/4 of a billion dollars in the bank. It’s basically an extremely well funded startup with a bit of a head start on the EV market at this point.

With the number of companies (from Tesla to Chevrolet) with large volumes actual EVs sold and on the road, I don't see how Nikola has a head start?

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#57

Post by jquery »

RC_ITR wrote: post #38
ajross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's very much a hindsight kind of thing. I mean, yes, Nikola was a scam. But in "the beginning" the only people willing to say that it was a scam were ones who sounded exactly like the much louder, better funded, and media-accessible people screaming that Tesla was a scam. This very site was filled with $TSLAQ nonsense. And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so. The investment world is drowning in d…

Hey, you’re not going to like hearing this, and feel free to ignore, but $TSLA is c. 20% below it’s peak valuation and still is trading at 100x earnings on pretty mediocre growth. It’s still wildly overvalued, people don’t talk about it as much though since the price is flat, not up. Be careful of confirmation bias.

I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#58

Post by pinewurst »

snarkypixel wrote: post #35
chasebank wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Older I get, more I realize the market is just a game of human psychology. Stocks, housing, crypto, etc. History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly but this time, who knows? If you happen to have the answer, I'm all ears.

"The father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, explained this concept by saying that in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine--assessing the substance of a company." Boring answer, but in the long-term, great businesses go up, whereas crappy businesses go bankrupt.

I think this was much more true in the long ago era of regulation, (mostly) autarky, and limited market info/trading barriers.

I've looked at "Security Analysis" and it's very much a historical piece - railroads and (practically) buggy whips. Things change relatively faster these days. Yesterday, Kodak was the bluest of chips; today, pretty much a joke. Heck, look at Buffett in the last decade - I'll bet he fully Grahamitized IBM, which didn't make it any less hollow. That sort of analysis, or even certainty (a false premise by definition) just isn't worth the effort for the average ownership span.

Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

#59

Post by adrr »

belter wrote: post #22
dreyfan wrote: post #2

And yet NKLA still has a $5B market cap despite the entire company being 100% fraud. Amazing. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/nkla

Well if a Deli can be worth 100 million... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/theres-a-single-new-jersey-d... Maybe all these valuations are correct and its the dollar that is going the direction of the zimbabwean dollar ? https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BA632_ZIMDLR_DV...

Deli was being turned into an acquisition vehicle to take a foreign company public. It’s a common way for a foreign company to access the US capital markets.
Post reply on HN