Roller-Coaster, Tight Pants, and Bromley Car Parks

It's hard to believe that next month I will have owned Tesla ($TSLA) for seven years. I've written about this investment several times since 2018 and although it had a terrible finish to the week yesterday, it's still up some 940% overall for me, but down about 12% so far this year.  

I'm a little top-heavy on this stock as it currently represents more than 25% of my "play" account, but it's nothing like the position that Canadian Christopher DeVocht managed to achieve before things took a turn for the worse.

Christopher DeVocht, a carpenter by day, successfully traded Tesla stock and options during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a record amount of stimulus helped stocks soar and drove a retail-trading boom.

At the end of 2019, DeVocht had C$88,000, or about $65,000, with the Royal Bank of Canada's brokerage division. At its peak in November 2021, according to the lawsuit, DeVocht's account grew to C$415 million, or about $306 million.

But DeVocht and his professional advisors didn't cash out and instead lost everything as a brutal bear market took hold in 2022, leading to staggering losses for his heavily concentrated portfolio.

$65k to $306m to zero is quite an emotional roller-coaster. One commenter stated that:

Yeah I would never have made $300M. As soon as I hit $10M, I would have cashed out, set up an annuity or plopped it all into index funds and went fishing and mountain biking the rest of my life.

Easier said than done. While I'm a big fan of index funds and cycling, fishing - not so much, I suspect many people would struggle to call it quits on reaching $10M especially if that number is reached rapidly. It would be a nice problem to have, but very easy for that market driver of greed to take over.

With Kiké Hernández hitting a Home Run for the Los Angeles Dodgers as they eliminated the San Diego Padres last night, presumably while wearing his extra tight pants, and Elon Musk talking about car parks at the Tesla Robotaxi unveiling yesterday, I'd be missing a great opportunity if I didn't mention this post from a couple of years ago which addresses both car parks (Bromley Sainsbury's specifically) and baseball pant tightness. 

MLB Totals, Playoffs, and Ice Cream

It seems a long time ago now, but the issue I mentioned in the last post regarding the line for the Green Bay Packers @ Tennessee Titans has now been corrected, and the winning bet will now show up in the 'official' results.

Peter confirmed my thoughts, and my betting, writing:

That Green Bay spread line from Killer Sports is wrong. I placed my bet at +3 only a few minutes before the start and was watching the lines across the board until the kick offs and it didn't move into favouritism. And covers.com reports on the result: "Green Bay covered the spread of +3."

Mistakes happen, but Killer Sports corrected this one fairly quickly, so no harm done.

The MLB regular season has ended and for the totals system which doesn't carryover into the playoffs, the all-time and 2024 season results are updated as below:

These calculations use the Pinnacle Dime line of -105 (1.952), but the system is historically profitable with the line as short as -123 (1.813):

Some of you may recall the UMPO system and while these low volume systems can be volatile in any one season and ROIs meaningless, historically the record is good, especially for qualifiers playing at Home and we have the first one for this season playing tonight. 

For some reason, Killer Sports no longer has the data for the first three seasons, but since 2007 the 'official' ROIs are 6.7% (all) and 14.2% (Home) - excluding the COVID season of 2020.

Due to the rule changes post-COVID, this system wasn't included in the Sacred Manuscript, but I feel confident now that it should be. 

On a personal note, our trip to the mountains was mostly very relaxing, but my wife was a little concerned when the campground was under an evacuation warning last Monday but personally, being surrounded on three sides by water (we were staying by a lake), I felt quite safe. In the end, no evacuation was necessary, and it was a very relaxing trip with no TV, and no computers (though I did have my phone with me). This meant plenty of time for reading and exercising, although the scales didn't have good news for me when I got back. The usual aphorism refers to doughnuts but adapted for me, it is true that 'you can't outrun an ice-cream'.

With now four years of personal health data, the clear trend is that I lose weight (hopefully fat) in the first quarter of a year (thanks to Dry January and New Year Resolutions) then gain weight every other month with the exception of October (thanks to Sober October, although there will be no fully sober October this year due to the trip extending beyond September by a few days).

It's often said that losing weight is 80% diet, 20% exercise but for me, calories ingested alone has a 91.1% correlation to weight loss, with exercise actually decreasing the correlation to 85.6%.

On a quarterly basis, if my average daily intake of calories is fewer than 2,230 I lose weight, as I do if I have fewer than 8 days a month with alcohol. It's that easy, but not very exciting.