The five-day moving average of individual investors’ net one-day purchases exceeded USD $450 million, the Wall Street Journal reported – over USD $300 million more than the second-best performing stock of the market, the SPDR S&P exchange-traded fund (ETF). The SPDR S&P 500 ETF tracks the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 large-cap U.S. stocks. It reported a five-day moving average of net one-day purchases under USD $150 million.
Next to Tesla and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, the Invesco QQQ ETF, Nasdaq-100 tracker, Apple, and Amazon rounded the spots for best-performing stocks and hardly hit the numbers the S&P 500 ETF – never mind Tesla – reached.
The Tesla investor, the Wall Street Journal pointed out, is loyal. When Tesla cut its electric vehicle prices and shares tumbled by more than 60% at the close of last year, Tesla investors scrambled to buy the dip instead of selling out. When Tesla shares bottomed out at the start of 2023, Tesla investors doubled down on stockpiling their shares. And as investor day approached, Tesla share purchases set new records.
By investor day, individual investors had put in over USD $500 million into Tesla, only to be disappointed by the event. Instead of announcing the long-speculated arrival of a less-costly electric vehicle, Tesla instead announced that its goal of becoming the largest car maker in the world by volume could only be achieved by even more projected expenses – costing the company around USD 150 billion in the coming years, the Wall Street Journal reported.
A fully sustainable future requires scale.
With our next-gen vehicle, manufacturing becomes significantly simpler & more affordable.
Our new unboxed manufacturing process will allow more work simultaneously on the vehicle—meaning we can build more vehicles at lower cost &… https://t.co/KxjtMrf3r0 pic.twitter.com/9YYt8wDFme
— Tesla (@Tesla) March 1, 2023
The investor-day letdown was what finally shook individual investors’ faith in Tesla – at least for a while. A day after its investor-day announcement, Tesla shares dropped by nearly 6%. The following day, however, Tesla closed at USD $197.79, recovering most of those losses.
