Investor Discussion Threads for 2015

Threads: Technical analysis
Short term thread
Long term thread
My trading strategy today (replaces 'social' short term)

Robert.Boston said:

Late in 2013 we opened some "sticky" threads to help the conversational flow:
Social Chat - Short Term TSLA Movements
Short-Term TSLA Price Movements - 2014
Long-Term Fundamentals of Tesla Motors (TSLA)

My sense is that the split between the two short-term threads hasn't been very successful. I'd be interested in people's views about what other ways we might try to organize the conversation, or if we should simply have one massive thread chatting about short-term stuff.

@jhm suggests "a separate short-term thread just for technical analysis." It occurred to me that a "my trading strategy today" thread could be another way to slice some of the general conversation into its own thread.

Other ideas? Or votes for consolidated chatter?

(The Short-Term thread cut-over to a new, functionally identical 2014 vintage on New Years, which I plan on doing again, just to keep the sheer size of that thread under control to aid searching.)

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I was actually thinking about this last week. What if we had a short-term, a long-term and something like a "news bulletin" thread. The news bulletin thread could simply be a place to mention any new data point being discussed on any of the threads that might impact the stock short or long term. Effectively we'd have an uncluttered go to place to see if there's a reason the stock is up or down $X dollars today, and to see if anything happened of significance the past Y days you did not have time to go through the other threads.

That is, on this new thread keep the content of posts simply to

1) state the new piece of information, i.e. Elon tweeted xyz, Morgan Stanley changed price target, Model X spy shots found,...

and

2)provide a link to the thread having a discussion about it... rather than clutter the news bulletin thread with discussion.

I've just found it hard to read through the 3 main threads, any of which new information can pop up on the way things are currently.

For this to work, of course, people would have to remember to add a short post to this new thread as discussion went on in one of the other threads.

Trading strategy and TA should be merged into one thread.

I would advocate splitting out a thread for technical analysis. While I appreciate some see value in it, I personally do not. Splitting it out would benefit both groups : for some to read it all and for some to ignore it completely.

Here are the only three TMC sticky threads that I would prefer finding listed in the 2015 TSLA investor forum:

1) 2015 TSLA Share Price Movements and Trading Strategies: Short-Term, Long-Term, Fundamentals, Technicals, Anecdotals & News (options strategies in a separate thread)

2) 2015 TSLA Exchange Traded Options Strategies

3) 2015 Brief Summaries of Current News (that may affect Tesla Motors and could be discussed with more detail in other threads)

I lumped most categories into thread #1, since I’d rather not hop among several threads to find items related to the day’s top TSLA investment considerations.

Short-term and long-term share prices theoretically move in sync, i.e. if the price is up a dollar tomorrow, the price five years from that date should be at least a dollar higher than previously expected. The same news affects both short-term and long-term share price expectations. The price today is theoretically a reasonably discounted figure from an expected future price which includes assumptions of future news and data. Therefore having both short-term and long-term threads leads to unnecessary redundancies.

Curt Renz said:

Here are the only three TMC sticky threads that I would prefer finding listed in the 2015 TSLA investor forum:

1) 2015 TSLA Share Price Movements and Trading Strategies: Short-Term, Long-Term, Fundamentals, Technicals, Anecdotals & News (options strategies in a separate thread)

2) 2015 TSLA Exchange Traded Options Strategies

3) 2015 Brief Summaries of Current News (that may affect Tesla Motors and could be discussed with more detail in other threads)

I lumped most categories into thread #1, since I’d rather not hop among several threads to find items related to the day’s top TSLA investment considerations.

Short-term and long-term share prices theoretically move in sync, i.e. if the price is up a dollar tomorrow, the price five years from that date should be at least a dollar higher than previously expected. The same news affects both short-term and long-term share price expectations. The price today is theoretically a reasonably discounted figure from an expected future price which includes assumptions of future news and data. Therefore having both short-term and long-term threads leads to unnecessary redundancies.

Click to expand...

This sounds reasonable to me.

Curt Renz said:

Here are the only three TMC sticky threads that I would prefer finding listed in the 2015 TSLA investor forum:

1) 2015 TSLA Share Price Movements and Trading Strategies: Short-Term, Long-Term, Fundamentals, Technicals, Anecdotals & News (options strategies in a separate thread)

2) 2015 TSLA Exchange Traded Options Strategies

3) 2015 Brief Summaries of Current News (that may affect Tesla Motors and could be discussed with more detail in other threads)

I lumped most categories into thread #1, since I’d rather not hop among several threads to find items related to the day’s top TSLA investment considerations.

Short-term and long-term share prices theoretically move in sync, i.e. if the price is up a dollar tomorrow, the price five years from that date should be at least a dollar higher than previously expected. The same news affects both short-term and long-term share price expectations. The price today is theoretically a reasonably discounted figure from an expected future price which includes assumptions of future news and data. Therefore having both short-term and long-term threads leads to unnecessary redundancies.

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I can see what Curt is saying about short term and long term merging. It may make sense as the way things evolved specific long term issues have their own threads here in the investor section (i.e. "China market situation", Gigafactory threads, etc). One massive long term thread covering all long term issues presents a challenge to an ongoing unbroken discussion of any of the distinct long term considerations. That happens considerably more easily in the existing individual threads.

i'll add my $0.02 -- i really like the "news bulletin" thread idea (where only news items are posted). would be great to have all the news in one place without a lot of discussion.

surfside

put it all back in one thread. I don't know about everyone else, but I read all of them. Jumping from one to another is a waste of time imo. I can take value from all the opinions, short term, long term, TA, today's trades, news etc.

SteveG3 said:

I can see what Curt is saying about short term and long term merging. It may make sense as the way things evolved specific long term issues have their own threads here in the investor section (i.e. "China market situation", Gigafactory threads, etc). One massive long term thread covering all long term issues presents a challenge to an ongoing unbroken discussion of any of the distinct long term considerations. That happens considerably more easily in the existing individual threads.

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Indeed, Steve, those specialized non-sticky threads pretty well cover long-term considerations, and do so in an unmixed manner that makes the discussion easier to follow. Their specific investment ramifications (long-term & short-term) can be further discussed in my recommended general thread #1. I suggested a separate thread for discussing exchange traded options strategies, since that seems to interfere with more general concerns related to the company and its stock. Your idea of a separate thread of news headlines is a very good one for those who want to quickly learn what news might be moving the stock that day.

So, the 'News headlines' thread would be a place to post links to articles, videos, analysis with just a quick description of what is in the link? I think that would be a good idea but fear that we would all be tempted to add comments. If it is intended just to be 'news' it will probably take a lot of moderator work to move the 'chat/comments' out.

Al, that would be problematic... what I was suggesting to avoid that was:

1) state the new piece of information, i.e. Elon tweeted xyz, Morgan Stanley changed price target, Model X spy shots found,...

and

2)provide a link to the thread having a discussion about it... rather than clutter the news bulletin thread with discussion.

That is, this proposed thread would sort of be a running set of headlines AND an index of which other investment thread the discussion on each respective headline has been taken up. For example, you might post on the headline thread: "Jonas reiterated buy, his comments included below... (insert excerpt of Jonas comments, and/or link to his article) I've posted this as well on short-term investing thread for discussion (or the analyst price target thread, etc, whatever the case may be).

We'd have to see how it panned out, but I think it's rather likely we could get accustomed to the headline thread as an uncluttered "just the facts" venue, leaving interpretation and discussion to the other threads.

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Curt Renz said:

Indeed, Steve, those specialized non-sticky threads pretty well cover long-term considerations, and do so in an unmixed manner that makes the discussion easier to follow. Their specific investment ramifications (long-term & short-term) can be further discussed in my recommended general thread #1. I suggested a separate thread for discussing exchange traded options strategies, since that seems to interfere with more general concerns related to the company and its stock. Your idea of a separate thread of news headlines is a very good one for those who want to quickly learn what news might be moving the stock that day.

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Thanks for explaining the part about options. I'd been thinking I'd prefer the TA broken out, but probably the options talk is significantly more prevalent than the TA posts, so maybe breaking out the options to it's own thread would be the best approach (I think in my mind I'd kind of lumped the two together).

Steve,

That is what worries me. I think the 'idea' of a headlines thread is great. I just think many people will start to post comments, explanations, etc.. Then, to keep the thread as intended the 'mods' will be doing some heavy lifting keeping it clean and as intended.

Al, there's certainly no guarantee that would not happen. Fortunately, if thread is used as intended, great, if it doesn't work and Mods are getting squeezed, they have a quick and easy remedy... close the thread.

An investor-related news-only thread seems a very good idea. At least to try out. As far as I am concerned, it wouldn't have to be headlines only, but new information only (i.e. it can include quotes), plus perhaps some comparison to information in other articles or news releases, for example a reference to contradicting information. But not a discussion of agreement or disagreement with conclusions or of importance, so there would often be a "discussed here:" link to other threads.

schonelucht said:

I would advocate splitting out a thread for technical analysis. While I appreciate some see value in it, I personally do not. Splitting it out would benefit both groups : for some to read it all and for some to ignore it completely.

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I vote for this.

I think the threads should be:
(1) Short-term technical
(2) Short-term everything else
(3) Long term

anticitizen13.7 said:

I vote for this.

I think the threads should be:
(1) Short-term technical
(2) Short-term everything else
(3) Long term

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One of the reasons I liked Curt's proposal is that I always thought the short/long term split was artificial. By excluding discussion about things that have long-term relevance, a short-term focused thread invites out-of-context thinking that doesn't necessarily help. "There's a long-term thread for that" has sometimes been used in alarmist posts as a response to more measured interpretations of recent price movements. I think it's better to keep them together.

I also vote to keep the TA stuff in the same umbrella thread, even though I don't use it myself. To many posters, it's part of the way they look at the market, and I think there's no larger benefit in asking them to discard a piece of their thinking when crafting their posts. I personally don't think TA is predictive, but it does offer a natural vocabulary to characterize price action, and in deference to the many who find it useful, I think we should keep it in the same thread.

The option stuff is a subject all its own, so it warrants its own thread. That worked out pretty well so far, actually. I'd keep only one, though (i.e., not split between advanced and newbie).

In a nutshell, for my 2 cents, Curt has it right.

Curt's proposal is reasonable, but I honestly had a tough time filtering out numerous TA posts this year.

What about:

(1) General Thread (news, short and long term TSLA business discussion)
(2) Technical Analysis
(3) Options

anticitizen13.7 said:

Curt's proposal is reasonable, but I honestly had a tough time filtering out numerous TA posts this year.

What about:

(1) General Thread (news, short and long term TSLA business discussion)
(2) Technical Analysis
(3) Options

Click to expand...

It's true that sometimes the thread grows a bit too quickly, but I find that ignoring a few posts in a row is much more bearable than having to chase eight separate threads, just in case someone said something worth reading. Having fewer restrictions also cuts down on the "this doesn't belong here" talk, which is the most irritating of all (to me, anyway). With this and the reasons I listed in the previous post, I submit we should not banish TA speak. Many find it useful.

BTW, the macro thread should also stick around in its current form, I find it very informative.