Blowing It Scenario #57-Shorting Stocks.

Betting against growth.

Tesla’s stock recently plunged because of an accident with one of it’s vehicles. Making those that shorted Tesla’s stock $1.8 billion over night. The action of shorting a stock isn’t necessarily blowing it in my eyes. It’s part of the market and it makes people a lot of money. Just go back to the housing market crash in 2007 and 2008. There you will see the people who were shorting stocks, were the only people making money. I do think it’s a failure to allow shorting in the first place. You are literally making a regressive bet of failure. You want to see that company crumble. And while it does, you reap the rewards. It’s a side bet against progress.

Tesla is making innovative leaps and bounds towards what one would hope will be a better future. They have improved electric car capabilities, they are working towards complete autonomous cars and semi trucks. It remains to be seen if self driving cars will be a massive failure of economy, when it displaces a majority of the work force. But we’re not quite there yet. Either way you swing it, it’s progress. Why bet against it unless you are rooting for it to fail? And in the case that you are doing exactly that, well you may just find pessimism might be a close ally to you as well.

The other area of concern is the fact that on very rare occasions people are dying at the hands of this new technology. An absolute tragedy with each event that occurs. And in an ideal world, progress would be made with no loss of life. However we don’t live in an ideal work. The early tragedies will give way to massive breakthroughs and prevention of accidents to many more in the future. When the first airplanes took off crashes were a common occurrences. Loss of life was tremendous but as the years progressed and technology improved that loss became minuscule. And now it’s rare to ever hear of anyone dying in a plane crash. This is the promising future we may get to enjoy when invention is improved upon. With each iteration the process gains depth of knowledge and all of a sudden one day we just magically live in a world with no automobile crashes. There may be some hiccups along the way. That is to be expected it’s sometimes the price of growth. But betting against future progress is a bet of failure.



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