Jacob Wolinsky

Rubicon Capital Group’s situation analysis of Identiv Inc (NASDAQ:INVE).

The standard method of determining what industry a company is in is by looking at its underlying business. By that standard, Tesla is clearly in the auto business.  Virtually all of the company’s revenues and costs are related to building, selling, and servicing automobiles.  But there is another way of checking whether a company is an industry that has implications for investors.  The idea is that if two companies are in the same industry, then their stock prices should tend to move together.  For example, when the Covid-19 crisis arose, the stocks of all major airlines collapsed together. This raises the question of whether using this second criterion Tesla is in the auto industry. Before turning to the results, a couple caveats are in order.

Those shorting stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic have made more than $50 billion in profits. Billionaire Bill Ackman recently said that activist short sellers are far more efficient than regulators at unearthing corporate frauds, and that regulators should work with short sellers. Here we take a look at the top 10 best performing activist short calls in the first half of 2020 that paid off big time.

In his latest letter to investors, Mohnish Pabrai warned about the perils of buying stocks at high prices. He explained that it’s possible to overpay for even the market’s most promising companies. Giving Microsoft as an example, Pabrai noted:

As US economy is heading toward its disastrous 2nd quarter results, the Trump administration is considering the expansion of the trade war to finance, which could destabilize the US dollar and derail the post-pandemic global economy.

The gold price reached a new record high this week, beating the previous record set on Sept. 5, 2011. The gold price kept rising past the record high to new heights as the week wore on, and now the $1,940 record that was set on July 28 appears to have become the new floor for the price amid today’s pullback.