Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares have been soaring this year, and early investors have watched their investment grow. One of those investors is Patrick Hop, a 22-year-old college student who attends University of California, Berkeley. CNBC’s Phil LeBeau interviewed him on Friday about his investment.
Tesla investment pays off
Hop told CNBC that everyone he knew told him not to invest in Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) a year ago, but now he’s glad he ignored them. He sunk his $30,000 life savings into shares of the automaker’s stock a year ago, and now his investment is worth about $250,000. He told CNBC that he kept telling his friends that Tesla would be “huge,” and his friends thought he was “crazy.” He says they are now surprised that his investment has paid off in such a big way.
At this point, all of Hop’s gains are still on paper, although that paper is still going up in value. Shares of Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) closed out Friday 3 percent higher, taking the stock over $160 a share for the first time in the company’s history. That marked a major milestone for the company. Its shares have now risen more than 400 percent over the last year.
Hop explains his Tesla investment
When Hop initially invested in Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), the stock was trading at $32. When it rose to $115 a share, he sold his shares off. However, instead of taking a huge profit, he reinvested his money into call options which expire in January 2015 with a $130 strike price. Hop doesn’t think it was risky going into the options, but he thinks he might dump them “in the next month or two.”
At this point we don’t know just how high of a profit Hop will walk away with, but he told CNBC that he’s hoping to start his own company one day, and he believes that his initial investment of a large amount in one company was the right thing. He considers himself to be an expert on Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) because he spends so much time tracking and researching the automaker.
