On August 29, 2023, Tesla finished the regular trading at $257.18, up +18.36 or +7.69% from the previous day on heavy volume of 134,047,603 shares. There was no significant Tesla specific news to account for this big jump. The one news related to Tesla came in the day before where Tim Zaman who works at Tesla on AI infrastructure announced they started using Nvidia 10,000 H100 GPUs to train Full Self Driving (FSD). Their video dataset is now over 200 PB. Musk tweeted that the H100 is 3x faster than the A100 they used previously. In addition, there was some positive macro economic indicators news that suggests the economy is slowing. Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary report for July showed the number of job openings is down -338,000 landing at 8.8 million. Professional and services jobs are down -198,000, health care -130,000, and state jobs, -67,000. A slowing economy might mean the interest rate hikes can stop soon. The collective intelligence of the investing community reacted to that news as a signal to buy and they all decided to invest in stocks and that buying pressure pushed prices higher. All stocks generally went up: S&P 500, +1.5%, Nasdaq Composite +1.7% and Dow +0.9%.
These kind of events are not predictable. How then do you ensure you don’t miss this kind of strong day? One sure way is to stay invested and invest for the long term. Pull out money and then going back in requires that you know when to cash out and also when to buy back in. You need to be right twice. It is much easier to dollar cost average and buy a position and stay invested. This unfortunately means you will suffer through down days. However, if your analysis is correct about the future prospect of the company and you made the purchase at a reasonable valuation, then you will eventually be rewarded with up days.