The electric vehicle maker’s stupendous rally in recent months has given shareholders something to cheer about, cost short-sellers billions of dollars and vindicated legions of retail investors who have long adored Elon Musk’s company.

Tesla shares have soared by nearly 320% since early June, helped by the company’s better-than-expected financial results and ramped-up production at its new car factory in Shanghai.

After surging 36% over Monday and Tuesday, the stock by Friday had settled back to a gain of about 15% for the week. On Friday afternoon, it was down marginally at $747.11.

Another factor driving this week’s surge may be fund managers hurrying to raise their allocation of the stock, analysts said.

“A lot of advisors and institutions, they jump in the bandwagon because they don’t want to trail,” said vocal Tesla bull Ross Gerber, president and chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki in Santa Monica, California. “If Tesla goes to $1,000 and they don’t own it, what are they going to tell their clients?”

Gerber trimmed his fund’s position in the stock as the company’s valuation soared. He hopes to buy more if the stock falls and said a fair valuation would be around $550.

THE BULLS

Retail investors have driven part of the surge.

Among Fidelity Investments customers, Tesla has been by far the most actively traded stock in recent sessions, with nearly 16,000 buy orders for the electric carmaker’s shares. Twitter, ranked second overall in trading activity on Fidelity, had just over 2,000 buy orders.

On Monday, when Tesla shot up 20% in its biggest one day rally since 2013, clients at TD Ameritrade – millennials in particular – overwhelmingly took profits after having bought the stock for months, said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at the online brokerage.

Tesla’s biggest institutional shareholders are Baillie Gifford, Capital World and Vanguard, according to Refinitiv data.

It also has an international following. Retail investors in South Korea have been trading Tesla shares at a furious pace in recent weeks, buying and selling $200 million worth of stock in January, according to the Korea Securities Depository. Volume in November stood at $43 million.

Tesla options positioning is also bullish. According to data from options analytics provider Trade Alert, skew turned deeply negative this week, meaning that demand for calls, used to position for further share gains, has surpassed demand for puts, used to guard against a fall in shares.

That’s a departure from the usual dynamic in most stocks, in which options used for downside protection generally command prices higher than those for upside participation.

Mining cryptocoins is an arms race that rewards early adopters. You might have heard of Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency that was released in early 2009. Similar digital currencies have crept into the worldwide market since then, including a spin-off from Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash. You can get in on the cryptocurrency rush if you take the time to learn the basics properly.

Hover Shortcodes

You can use great shortcodes for comparison between: 

. Or . All can be used in posts and pages in numerous ways. You can use many other cryptocurrencies and normal currencies for . You absolutely need a strong appetite for reading and constant learning, as there are ongoing technology changes and new techniques for optimizing coin mining results.

Which Alt-Coins Should Be Mined?

If you had started mining Bitcoins back in 2009, you could have earned thousands of dollars by now. At the same time, there are plenty of ways you could have lost money, too. Bitcoins are not a good choice for beginning miners who work on a small scale. The current up-front investment and maintenance costs, not to mention the sheer mathematical difficulty of the process, just doesn’t make it profitable for consumer-level hardware. Now, Bitcoin mining is reserved for large-scale operations only.

How Cryptocoin Mining Works

Let’s focus on mining ‘scrypt’ coins, namely Litecoins, Dogecoins, or Feathercoins. The whole focus of mining is to accomplish three things:

• Provide bookkeeping services to the coin network. Mining is essentially 24/7 computer accounting called ‘verifying transactions’.
• Get paid a small reward for your accounting services by receiving fractions of coins every couple of days.
• Keep your personal costs down, including electricity and hardware.

As a hobby venture, yes, cryptocoin mining can generate a small income of perhaps a dollar or two per day. In particular, the digital currencies mentioned above are very accessible for regular people to mine, and a person can recoup $1000 in hardware costs in about 18-24 months.

(more…)

Best known as the immutable database that runs underneath cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is poised to play a critical role in every industry imaginable as businesses seek ways to cash in on the distributed ledger technology’s promise of enabling a “trustless” consensus to validate transactions.

Earnings in the past year

Smart miners need to keep electricity costs to under $0.11 per kilowatt-hour; mining with 4 GPU video cards can net you around $8.00 to $10.00 per day (depending upon the cryptocurrency you choose), or around $250-$300 per month.

Chart shows our earnings in the past year.

Financial transactions are typically guaranteed by a trusted third party (such as PayPal) and blockchain can be used to automate that process, reducing overall costs by cutting out the middleman with autonomous smart contracts acting as trusted intermediaries between parties on the network.

(more…)