Emotional Elon

"Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boast"- James 3:5

Hello everyone! Welcome to a special edition of the boodle blog. At boodle we believe that the person best qualified to manage your money is you, and we offer our 27 years of financial insight and understanding to help you; our members learn to be better investors. You don't have to check your calendars, because the monthly boodle blog was published on June 1. We felt that there has been a lot of news that can affect our clients in an adverse way, and so we decided to offer our members a special blog so that mistakes can be avoided and lessons can be learned.

In March of this year, someone close to me looked distraught and upset. When I asked this person what was wrong, they told me that they wanted to sell their portfolio and move their money to cash. Now, I knew what the reason was behind this shocking move. The stock market had phunged by more than 3000 points after Trump announced his tariff policies on countries around the world. This person had built a portfolio that up until this point had been behaving well, but now $60,000 was apparently lost. I cautioned against making any such move like cashing out, as I believed at the time, this would have potentially been a disastrous move for a retail investor

We will share what this person ultimately decided to do and what the outcome was to their portfolio at the end of this blog.

The next story we'd like to share with you was recently in the news, when Elon Musk and Donald Trump got into a huge online fight over the spending bill that is still being debated in Congress and the detrimental fallout that was felt by the shareholders of Tesla stock. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and the CEO of Tesla and the world's richest man was hired by the Trump administration to head a government department called DOGE- Department Of Government Efficiency. The Trump administration created DOGE with the mandate of identifying and eliminating government waste and inefficiency. The Musk government position was expected to sunset 6 months after its creation. When Musk left the position he had harsh words for Trump because Trump supported the  bill mentioned earlier and it would eliminate subsidies to EV companies and other green projects.Musk was visibly upset, and he didn't hold his tongue when he blasted President Trump and his "Big Beautiful Bill". Elon Musk lost his cool and went ballistic! What was the result of his tirade on Trump for the Tesla shareholders? Tesla stock lost $150 billion dollars in value. At boodle, one of the subjects that we talk about often is a subject that seemingly has nothing to do with making money but can have a huge impact on how your portfolio grows. That subject is emotions. Your emotions serve a purpose in your life, but we believe that when it comes to investing, the prudent investor is the investor who can control his emotions. We have seen emotions destroy the portfolios of many people. Most of you know that when you start on the journey of financial security with boodle, we often discuss emotions more than we talk about making money. The reason we do this is because our 27 years of investing knowledge have shown us the importance of managing your emotions & expectations. We once had a client who was a bit critical of boodle, because he wanted a recommendation on a stock that would go up 500%, but our stock recommendation that he received only went up 100%! As we end this special blog for our clients, we can report that Musk apologized for his outburst, and Tesla stock has made up some lost ground, and the person who lost $60,000 in their portfolio has made back nearly 99% of their losses. Always tap down your emotions when you want to grow your money.

Let these 2 examples be your teacher when it comes to understanding the role of emotions in your portfolio. Don’t be an Emotional Elon.

Thank you, and enjoy your day.