What is an effective way to invest in electric car industry?
At this time I would say that the electric car industry as a whole is too new to be able to invest in it as a sector.  There are only a handful of companies that focus solely on electric cars to create a moderately diverse portfolio, let alone a mutual fund.  You can invest in mutual funds that include EV stocks as part of an auto sector or clean energy play, for example, but there's just not enough for an EV-only fund at this point. At this point, perhaps the best you can do if you want an exclusively EV portfolio is add some exposure to the companies that are the biggest players in the market and review the market periodically to see if any additional investments could be made to improve your diversification.  Look at EV-only car makers, battery makers, infrastructure providers, etc. to get a decent balance of stocks. I would not put any more than 10% of your entire investment portfolio into any one stock, and not more than 20% or so in this sector. You could have googled this question.  I did so and found a link to this article. YMMV taking investment advice from thestreet.com is very likely to lose you money.  However, there do not seem to be any sector funds that specifically focus on the electric vehicle market. Along similar, but not exactly the same lines, there are sector funds that focus on renewable energy.  This article reviews some of them.
"While I agree with the overarching narrative regarding the car industry, self driving cars, and how people will use transportation in the future, I deeply disagree with his timeframe and reject that his clearly large city centric thinking will effect all parts of the country and all parts of the world.   There is no way this happens as quickly as he says it will for the following reasons:   On his claim that electric cars will be all anyone will buy: 1. We lack the road or electrical grid infrastructure to support tens of millions of electric vehicles throughout the US, this will take far more than just 5-10 years, especially in the more rural parts of the country.  2. We lack the production capacity to create the batteries for 17 million of yearly sales of automobiles for the few years between 2021-2025 when everyone is presumably just buying only electric self driving cars.  3. The used market for combustion engine cars will ""tank"" so strongly that it will actually create demand for people to buy combustion cars, as the costs will now outweigh the savings of buying a new car with lower running costs, thus pushing his timeline out into the future by several years.  4. Cars, even electric cars, are much more complicated, durable, expensive, and prone to damage and accidents than most software and disposable consumer electronics he cites in his examples. Of course Nokia went from 50% of the market to 5% over one product cycle! People completely replaced their phones every 2-3 years back then! Wireless carriers built a system where even if your phone worked, you had little to no reason not to lock in another contract and get the next best phone. Of course people would dump their Nokia bricks for an iPhone, it was the next best thing. Cars have a much longer life cycle, and inefficient older models will be around for decades in some cases because they will be a sunk cost for those who bought them.   On his claim that no one will own a car anymore and everyone will ride share:  1. How does one decide to take a road trip somewhere? What about people who travel for a living or as an integral part of doing their job?  2. I personally think a ride sharing transportation network represents a limiting of freedom. (Though I can see why people might make the opposite point) People identify with owning their own cars, keeping their own belongings in them, having them for use whenever they so need or desire. People who don't live in dense urban cores (I.e, a huge group of Americans, and especially a huge group of Americans who are older, have money, and are set in their ways.) aren't going to see this as nearly as attractive as someone who lives in New York or San Fransisco might, and those people hardly buy cars anyway.  3. People are fucking stubborn. It's going to take a lot for people to decide to change up such an integral part of their daily lives. This will not happen over a 3-4 year cycle.  4. Where is the infrastructure to park, charge, and perform maintenance on all these autonomous vehicles? We will need more cars available during rush hour than at 3pm or 3am for that matter. Where do the cars go then?  5. This simply won't work quickly in countries outside the very top of the first world. They won't have the infrastructure or capital to invest to bring it up to speed fast enough to derail oil demand as quickly as he claims.  5. This theory implies a central government that is in complete control to implement rules in support of autonomous cars. I believe most of this will be done at the state and municipality level at first, with some cities hopping on board and others banning the practice.  6. This theory also implies that the technology will be flawless. The first completely computer aided pedestrian disaster or multi car pile up will undoubtedly cause massive backlash (regardless of the statistics showing general reduction in accidents) and might clog this entire concept up in bureaucracy for decades as the government forces stricter and stricter safety and quality requirements on the software.   I'm not saying his view isn't the long run eventually for mobility in the US and the world in general, but applying personal electronic technology cycle rules to large scale durable goods that work in real space instead of cyber space, represents a whole different set of challenges and could easily take 25-50 years to really pull off. Over that time, oil markets will right size themselves, and the automotive manufacturers will consolidate and cater their product lineups to meet demand/service the fleet.   TL:DR - this will take much longer to accomplish than he surmises. Infrastructure takes time to build, cars are a different technology than consumer electronics, people are stubborn." "Most electric vehicles effectively run on coal.  When I make my fortune and get my *LUDICROUS MODE* Tesla, my plate will be ""BRN COAL"".  Saw an article on this site recently that claimed the production of Tesla's batteries far exceeded the emissions of a regular car." Kids Electric Car is a leading supplier and exporter of ride on cars for children with a wide range of kid’s electric ride-on toy cars with 4v, 6v, 12v and 24v electric cars. We have been supplying high quality, durable and latest model licensed ride on car for kids since 2005. Our aim is to provide wholesalers with safe and long-lasting cars for children to enjoy. http://www.rideoncar.cn/products/ride-on-cars Dude it's not about being competitive. It has advantages in its own that no other car maker is currently doing. Sure, it's not the cheapest car on the market but it's • Fully electric. • Drives by itself (+$5000 autopilot which chevy doesn't even offer. STILL cheaper than chevy's upgrade which puts it at almost $42k). • Known for being the safest cars on the road. • And it's damn beautiful.  So even though you're not getting your bottom of the barrel deal, you get what you pay for. "Pay off your debt.  As you witnessed, no ""investment"" % is guaranteed.  But your debt payments are... so if you have cash, the best way to ""invest"" it is to pay off your debt.  Since your car is depreciating while your house may be appreciating (don't know but it's possible) you should pay off your car loan first.  You're losing money in more than one way on that investment." i haven't done the precise math to update with the latest call, so you might be right about that.  I will do it some week next time.  As to the other questions:  1.  Every major car company is doing research.  There is going to be massive competition.  2.  Your last sentence confirms my view that you don't understand the issues.  In the real world there is specialization.  Some companies design cars, others design batteries.  So of course the car companies don't have the good battery tech, because they are not battery companies.  The rest of the industry isn't stupid.  Battery companies don't try to make cars, and car companies don't make batteries.  Musk has jumped into an industry he is not a specialist at.  It just so happens I know something about batteries.  The simple fact that Musk is talking about Lithium Ion batteries proves that his tech is no good.  the ACTUAL BATTERY COMPANIES declined to spend massive capital for a plant to supply TSLA cars.  That is why he has to make his own.  Committing huge amounts of capital on old technology is a frightful idea.  THE ACTUAL BATTERY COMPANIES wouldn't do it.  But you think Musk knows more about batteries than the actual battery companies. If you have money and may need to access it at any time, you should put it in a savings account.  It won't return much interest, but it will return some and it is easily accessible.   If you have all your emergency savings that you need (at least six months of income), buy index-based mutual funds.  These should invest in a broad range of securities including both stocks and bonds (three dollars in stocks for every dollar in bonds) so as to be robust in the face of market shifts.   You should not buy individual stocks unless you have enough money to buy a lot of them in different industries.  Thirty different stocks is a minimum for a diversified portfolio, and you really should be looking at more like a hundred.  There's also considerable research effort required to verify that the stocks are good buys.  For most people, this is too much work.  For most people, broad-based index funds are better purchases.  You don't have as much upside, but you also are much less likely to find yourself holding worthless paper.   If you do buy stocks, look for ones where you know something about them.  For example, if you've been to a restaurant chain with a recent IPO that really wowed you with their food and service, consider investing.  But do your research, so that you don't get caught buying after everyone else has already overbid the price.  The time to buy is right before everyone else notices how great they are, not after.   Some people benefit from joining investment clubs with others with similar incomes and goals.  That way you can share some of the research duties.  Also, you can get other opinions before buying, which can restrain risky impulse buys.   Just to reiterate, I would recommend sticking to mutual funds and saving accounts for most investors.  Only make the move into individual stocks if you're willing to be serious about it.  There's considerable work involved.  And don't forget diversification.  You want to have stocks that benefit regardless of what the overall economy does.  Some stocks should benefit from lower oil prices while others benefit from higher prices.  You want to have both types so as not to be caught flat-footed when prices move.   There are much more experienced people trying to guess market directions.  If your strategy relies on outperforming them, it has a high chance of failure.  Index-based mutual funds allow you to share the diversification burden with others.  Since the market almost always goes up in the long term, a fund that mimics the market is much safer than any individual security can be.  Maintaining a three to one balance in stocks to bonds also helps as they tend to move in opposite directions.  I.e. stocks tend to be good when bonds are weak and vice versa. Okay, I think I managed to find the precise answer to this problem! It involves solving a non-linear exponential equation, but I also found a good approximate solution using the truncated Taylor series. See below for a spreadsheet you can use. Let's start by defining the growth factors per period, for money in the bank and money invested:   Now, let S be the amount ready to be invested after n+1 periods; so the first of that money has earned interest for n periods. That is,  The key step to solve the problem was to fix the total number of periods considered. So let's introduce a new variable: t = the total number of time periods elapsed So if money is ready to invest every n+1 periods, there will be t/(n+1) separate investments, and the future value of the investments will be:  This formula is exact in the case of integer t and n, and a good approximation when t and n are not integers. Substituting S, we get the version of the formula which explicitly depends on n:  Fortunately, only a couple of terms in FV depend on n, so we can find the derivative after some effort:  Equating the derivative to zero, we can remove the denominator, and assuming t is greater than zero, we can divide by the constant ( 1-G t ):  To simplify the equation, we can define some extra constants:    Then, we can define a function f(n) and write the equation as:  Note that α, β, γ, G, and R are all constant. From here there are two options: Use Newton's method or another numerical method for finding the positive root of f(n). This can be done in a number of software packages like MATLAB, Octave, etc, or by using a graphics calculator. Solve approximately using a truncated Taylor series polynomial. I will use this method here. The Taylor series of f(n), centred around n=0, is:  Truncating the series to the first three terms, we get a quadratic polynomial (with constant coefficients):  Using R, G, α, β and γ defined above, let c0, c1 and c2 be the coefficients of the truncated Taylor series for f(n):    Then,  n should be rounded to the nearest whole number. To be certain, check the values above and below n using the formula for FV. Using the example from the question: For example, I might put aside $100 every week to invest into a stock   with an expected growth of 9% p.a., but brokerage fees are $10/trade.   For how many weeks should I accumulate the $100 before investing, if I   can put it in my high-interest bank account at 4% p.a. until then? Using Newton's method to find roots of f(n) above, we get n = 14.004. Using the closed-form approximate solution, we get n = 14.082. Checking this against the FV with t = 1680 (evenly divisible by each n + 1 tested): Therefore, you should wait for n = 14 periods, keeping that money in the bank, investing it together with the money in the next period (so you will make an investment every 14 + 1 = 15 weeks.) Here's one way to implement the above solution with a spreadsheet. StackExchange doesn't allow tables in their syntax at this time, so I'll show a screenshot of the formulae and columns you can copy and paste: Formulae:  Copy and paste column A: Copy and paste column B: Results:  Remember, n is the number of periods to accumulate money in the bank. So you will want to invest every n+1 weeks; in this case, every 15 weeks.