> but you'd be bonkers to buy their stock right now.

You're probably correct; but didn't people say that when they went above $200 as well?

Yes. In general, you should only invest in individual stocks, if you know something that the market doesn't know.

Otherwise, just buy the most boring and low cost index fund you can find.

OTOH, it's a generally a bad idea to invest in a company when the primary owner & CEO looks at the stock price and tweets "LOL". I feel it'd be a rational decision to short TSLA now except that "markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". And also I like Tesla, don't want to short it :)

Yeah I've been hearing that basically since the IPO.

Has yet to payoff.

Too much FOMO and not enough 'I'd be bonkers to' - for as long as that's the case it pays to follow the FOMO!

(Not investment advice I'm willing to follow myself! But a comment elsewhere in this submission, and a recent Levine column, have discussed that.. yeah, basically following the trend works... I suppose it shouldn't be that surprising, add more signals and act more quickly and you've reinvented a successful industry/form of professional trading.)

Probably not at that point, but if some PC media downgrades Tesla because Elon smoked marijuana on a podcast, or one of the millions of Teslas burn down after a crash (while the passengers survive), that's a great time to buy.

you'd have been bonkers to buy it at any point in the past 5 years and yet look at it now.

There were actually a few times where it was a sensible buy. Right after they got the Model 3 production line going, for starters. Right now it's being forced up by the stupendously large amount of money being injected into the stock market, which can't go on forever no matter what Tesla does.

Not saying I'd bet against them, mind you. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as they say. And even so it's probably not too bad a bet if you could hold it for 20+ years, but it's going to dive before it rises again.

Why? VW earned 13 billion EUR after taxes in 2019, Tesla is still negative for 2019 in total. And yet the market cap of Tesla is 187b USD while for VW it's 80b USD.

Stock prices have apparently nothing to do with company earnings and performance so how do you know Tesla isn't worth 2000/3000/4000$ per stock?

Investors buy Tesla because they hope a lot of others will too in the future. As long as this hope is there and more people put their money into Tesla, the stock price will continue to rise.

What you are describing is not an investment strategy, at the end it sounds like a pyramid scheme.

In the investing world they call it a bubble.

... while telling the greater fools that it’s because of Tesla’s superior self-driving capabilities and battery tech.

Stock prices are about future, not past profitability.