neroden
Model S Owner and Frustrated Tesla Fan
Actually, I think this is a difference between:Okay here is the deal about buying on a dip.. buying on a dip makes you feel like a genius (in retrospect) however it is a very risky thing to do in the stock market
(a) being short term vs. being long term. If you're investing for the long-term based on a valuation thesis, there's no risk to buying on a short-term dip (except if you're leveraged; see below). If it goes lower, whatever. (A *long term* dip of multiple years due to mismanagement is another matter though -- I could discuss those.) If you're investing for the short term, however, there's a much bigger risk to "catching a falling knife".
There's another way to put this: Momentum trading works over the short term, but stinks over the long term. Value/growth investing works over the long term, but not necessarily over the short term (though it can pay off in the short term sometimes).
(b) being on leverage and not being on leverage. Buying into a falling market with no leverage is not very risky at all! At most, you can lose your initial investment, and you've minimized that. (And you can wait for the stock to recover). Buying into a falling market with leverage, by contrast, is highly risky, because, wait for it, "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", and you can end up with debt larger than the mark-to-market value. And be forced to close out positions when you didn't want to.
When I loaded up on TSLA in September, October and November, if it had gone even lower, I would have bought even more. But I would have stopped before I had to borrow money.
So we're both right, 007 -- we're just using different investment strategies. What is suitable for one is not suitable for the other.
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