Not really. Well, do what you want, this just a journal of investment adventures not a source of investment advice. The title is just a catchy way to talk about my mid-year report card and another fun chapter in the LMC saga.

Reddit post claiming an LMC Endurance visited Tesla. Larger photo below.

I mean, it kind of has good DD. Let me explain. The most recent buzz propagated by the LMC sub was that John Vo (VP of Propulsion) updated his LinkedIn with a picture "at Tesla".

The bottom-rated commentary noted the "drainage canal and barbed wire-topped fence", but it was largely ignored. The rest of the commentary was either facetious "it's shopped" or building hype that Elon wants hub motors. Indeed, another thread later dropped this nugget:

ibrakeforsquirrels58

Some people are saying that Musk is looking to acquire LMC.

Ah. The old standby, "some people are saying". Bigly DD right here.

LMC Endurance "at Tesla" vs Google Maps street view of what is almost certainly the actual photo location.

Anyway, it took entire minutes to find that the photo in question was taken from an ungated parking lot at Thermo Fisher Scientific, next to the Tesla factory.

So I guess this LinkedIn update isn't a prelude to a Tesla buyout. Why did I label this "good DD"?

Well, why on Earth would you drive/tow a prototype electric vehicle to a parking lot near Tesla? Why would you include a Tesla in the photo?

More disclosures

Onto more mundane matters, LMC IR added a new document (proxy statement update?) to their site. It was pretty ho-hum, but it included the following passage:

We also intend to build company-owned service centers where we offer maintenance, repair, parts, and other services related to our products.

This is their apparent solution to Camping World pulling out of an agreement(?) to provide service centers. The copium immediately kicked in...

ewisher

No one was happy with camping world anyways.

No one was happy with Steve Burns. No one was happy with being at war with Eurasia. But there were some measured takes:

Friendly-Internet-54

I don't like this. It's going to take too much time and money to build a significant number of these

Indeed, kind of feels like Nikola's solar powered hydrogen refuelling station or whatever it was. I mean, an auto shop is considerably simpler than Nikola's vapor stations, but creating such a network still requires planning, investment, and time. Luckily the hub motors are "validated for 100,000 miles" so these service stations don't need to be complete for several years.

Unless this 'validation' is not accurate. Unless the vehicles have manufacturing defects. Unless the trucks get into a collision.

Anyway, I wish the stock was at like $80 instead of $8, there'd be a lot more room to run. On the other hand, it's alarming to see that there are Redditors on the LMC sub that don't appear to be astroturfers. I thought I was just reading Fyre influencer tweets, not the actual attendees.

And some bonus material

"Why we need to invest in USA... here in the USA by American Workforce" definitely sounds like the words of someone from Brooklyn.

They're so mad at the "media fud" that they've taken up pen and paper. Remember that it's unpatriotic to report unpleasant facts about an American business.

Net returns by stock ticker from six months of wheel trading - with some YOLOs/hedges.

How has it been wheel trading weeklies? Not too bad. I have some numbers from six months of selling options while the market repeatedly hit ATHs. So nothing here's going to be all that impressive, but it's been risk-limited in a volatile period. Volatility??? If you'll recall, retail tried to overthrow institutionals, red hats tried to overthrow democracy, and the money printer could have run out of ink at any time.

In addition to not being impressive, the numbers are sort of unhelpful. Return is normally expressed in a percentage, but I can't easily tease percent return from etrade's downloadables. So it'll have to suffice to say that this came from an options trading budget that was briefly exhuasted by NVDA CSPs, so say like 55-75k.

We can still do some informative things with the data, e.g. normalize by the number of transactions to see which tickers were IV leaders:

Net returns by stock ticker as above, but normalized by number of moves.

Okay, so how much of the trading was selling options (CSPs/CCs/theta gang/wheel) and how much was buying Kraft Heinz YOLOs or - more reasonably - buying calls on inverses in case the rug pull occured?

Options purchased compared to options sold.

Is the wheel perfectly round? It is not.

Comparison of covered calls to cash-secured puts during this time. Stonks don't go down.

And finally, how often were the options long-expiration and how often were they FDs?

Weekly options trades vs longer expiration.

Notably omitted are other investment types such as shares purchased normally and bonds. As this time window is 01 January to 30 June, it doesn't include the SPCE share dilution debacle.

Related / internal

Related / external