White Collar crime pays well, no lofty prison sentences.
Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
131–140 of 533 posts
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#132And yet NKLA still has a $5B market cap despite the entire company being 100% fraud. Amazing. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/nkla
Thank /r/WSB for that. No one can short dog companies anymore for fear of being short squeezed.
That subreddit is just a scapegoat. There are so many other places people are looking for the next big return.
Also you can short dog companies still. But if there are to many people shorting it, like GME had, you do run this risk. That's not any internet forum's fault.
That said, it can be really hard to make money betting on stocks to go down. I believe it was Care.com where people were putting out similar reports of how terrible the company was & the horrific incidents happening. In the first half of 2018 you had articles pointing out all these issues. It's stock kept going up around 30% before it finally crashed in the beginning of 2020.
Of course it is only fair to also call out all the quality companies where short investor companies try to keep the price down for ages or publish BS to profit off shorts. That was a big thing for those who were happy to short squeeze during GME.
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Tesla wasn't faking videos by rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill. They're shipping almost a million cars a year now (looks to be like 850k in 2021 I think). Mine took me to Yellowstone a few weeks back. Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree. That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming t…
Well but Tesla is still calling their drive assist autopilot and Musk has at multiple times in the past said full independent driving is just around the corner and all these "around the corner" dates have past and there still is not fully independent autopilot.
So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 Gra…
Kodak is a terrible example. That company had a long decline into irrelevance. Big companies have been doing that forever.
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#135Interesting 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 )
Well... remember the hertz saga?
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#136Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#137This should not be surprising to anyone. Arstechnica has followed Nikola's terrible and obvious fraud(s) for years now: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/02/nikola-admits-to-making... https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/nikola-stock-craters-af... https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-patented-a-stole... And many more... The speculation around this stock has been insane for many years now: https://arstechnica.c…
Even the name screams transparent fraud, a ridiculously obvious attempt to associate with Tesla. Weren't there VCs who put money into this? What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?
>a ridiculously obvious attempt to associate with Tesla.
Nikola was building barely functional prototypes of their trucks years before Tesla was building barely functional Semi truck prototypes, for the record.
>What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?
Fundamentally, what have they done that's so evil compared to, say, the multitude of things Tesla has claimed over the past few years?
For example, Tesla claimed door-to-door cross country self-driving tests, oh, about 5 years ago. At what point is it aspiration versus indictable fraud?
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#138This should not be surprising to anyone. Arstechnica has followed Nikola's terrible and obvious fraud(s) for years now: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/02/nikola-admits-to-making... https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/nikola-stock-craters-af... https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-patented-a-stole... And many more... The speculation around this stock has been insane for many years now: https://arstechnica.c…
I browse through a lot of niche investing social media groups. One of the more liked posts on a Nikola investment group was, "If "they" cared about the future, the earth and the renewable energy issue, they would let whatever Trevor did slide."
Surprisingly, I saw similar posts about Musk on the Thailand rescuer tweet and the price too high tweet. You are not betting against the fundamentals or the realities of the stock, you are betting against these people.
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 Gra…
> this was much more true in the long ago era of regulation
It's still true. We just haven't had, in close to a generation now, the sort of bear market that permits the enforcers of fundamentals to re-emerge: liquidation and bankruptcy against overvaluation; M&A against undervaluation.
Re: Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Nikola thing looks pretty weird indeed, but to be fair, Musk's name for his company is also not very original, since he (or whoever) also just took the dude's name even though he had absolutely nothing to do with him.
Tesla invented the AC motor which was used in the first roadster so thats why they named it that. Very logical…
And I remember around the time Tesla-the-car-company first emerged, rolling my eyes at the name. Like "Oh here we go, another EV startup using the guy's name without permission because his estate isn't set up to sue anyone who speaks it the way Edison's is. Best we can hope for is they do something cool and don't dishonor his legacy."
There are times I'm glad to have misjudged someone.