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One thing I've realized in my short time in investing is that time is key. If you have enough time, and invest in quality companies, you will make boatloads of money. Here are some companies I invested in and sold with tiny profits or even at a loss in just the last year
Nvidia bought $30 sold $35
Netflix bought 90, sold 85
Facebook bought $95, sold 120
Tesla bought $155, sold $145
Tesla rebought $180... still holding
Nvidia Rebought 106 still holding
Had I bought the companies and just forgot about them, I would probably have made 2-3 times my initital 50k investment. Instead, I basically broke even.
Moral of the story, you believe in the company, buy it and hold it for 1-10years. I no longer sell. Instead I set target dates and will hold steady till then
from recollection... Elon took a $500m loan collateralized by stock about 2 years back?
Yup... note that the SolarCity PPA was signed before February, 2016. The AES project was signed in January, 2017. The SolarCity Kauai Project was delivered in Q3/Q4 2016 using PowerPack 2 with cells made in Japan. We also don't know the actual costs to SolarCity, Tesla, or AES. We do know that the PPA rate from Q1, 2016 isn't really relevant to projects in 2017. We know that battery storage costs have been dropping. We know that Gigafactory sourced cells will be cheaper. And Tesla's own inverters are cheaper. It may very well even be that the cost estimates from Q1, 2016 for the costing of the PPA were significantly changed by the time the project was actually delivered (ie. more margin for Tesla) since the original cost may have reflected PowerPack 1 and 3rd party inverters. Finally, there was likely a double mark up (SolarCity and Tesla) since the two company's were not combined at that point.
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Dennisj00
Member
Meanwhile Bezos sells $1B of AMZN per year to fund Blue Horizon;
While EM leverages SpaceX shares and revenue to fund TSLA/TE
Talk about a Space race...
How Jeff Bezos will apply the lessons learned at Amazon to space travel
CNBC on Twitter
While EM leverages SpaceX shares and revenue to fund TSLA/TE
Talk about a Space race...
How Jeff Bezos will apply the lessons learned at Amazon to space travel
CNBC on Twitter
The main difference between these systems is, of course, *what year they were contracted*, which kind of renders any direct comparison irrelevant for the purposes of looking at competitive positions of companies. It's like using out of date solar panel price quotes. Both companies' prices have gone down since then.
anticitizen13.7
Not posting at TMC after 9/17/2018
Taking out a loan (which has to be paid back), is different than cashing out and phoning it in.
Seriously?
Tesla owns the batteries, PV, etc. 100%
KUIC only cost from the Battery bank/PV array is cost of electricity $0.139/kWh
That is all I am saying.
I am asking are there any other costs to KUIC from other battery sources such as AES or is that one also only $0.11/kWh? and is there a contract in place? If you look at pictures of Island, you may note a bunch of PV, hydro etc so it's a mix.
rather than arguing is Tesla or AES cheaper, it would be more accurate to argue, are Tesla, and AES and other PV and hydro projects cheaper than importing diesel?
Tesla launches its Powerpack 2 project in Hawaii, will help Island of Kauai get more out of its solar power
note: 69 megawatt projects in 2015 and 129 megawatts in 2025
Renewable Energy Projects | Kauai Island Utility Cooperative
You should go visit the factory. Your problem is that you can't tell the difference between physical hardware and vaporware.
Amazon doesn't make any profits either. It is in a business which is, historically, the lowest-margin sector out there (retail), competes primarily on price, and has a software infrastructure which is not only cloneable but has *already* been cloned by multiple companies (Alibaba comes to mind). The only division which has ever been profitable is AWS and that is *also* cloneable with multiple competitors, some of which didn't crash a couple of months ago. Amazon is also extremely capital-intensive, with a gigantic logistics operation. Its main advantage is the natural monopoly / network effects advantage, and whenever they try to take advantage of it they get investigated by regulators. Worse yet, their financial statements are as cryptic and uninformative as Jeff Bezos can get away with, containing less and less information every year.
There is certainly a lot of hot money in the market chasing returns, from Facebook (a widely hated company known for manipulating its targets, I mean users, and surviving solely on network effects) to Amazon to even more ridiculous things like Snapchat. Apple at least makes a product people like, even if the difference between it and a commodity product is 100% fashion.
Compared to this collection of stocks built on vapor and clouds (some of which are, to be sure, good investments -- I'm not saying they're not) I don't see how anyone in their *right mind* could call Tesla's steel-and-rubber and gigantic factories "dream euphoria".
If you mean BEP, than yes. You are forgetting the role that Tesla Energy plays in allowing Tesla to commit to massive battery cell volume from Panasonic and possibly other companies.
Apparently LG Chem and/or Samsung, possibly Panasonic
SDG&E and AES Energy Storage Unveil World's Largest Lithium Ion Battery-Based Energy Storage Installation | 02/28/17 | Markets Insider
I'm not suggesting anyone dump their TSLA shares, but if you believe stationary storage is a high growth segment, AES appears to be currently "best of breed." They were the first to grasp the significance of and exploit PURPA with respect to co-gen opportunities.
Anyone in their right mind would infer that Tesla's project was contracted a year or two earlier. And woo, look, it was.
This is how it works in something like the solar or battery industry with continually dropping prices. That's literally all there is to say about that.
Hey, hopefully AES will do great. There's probably room for, y'know, TWO major battery farm installers.
It appears to be a PPA just like Tesla's in that regard:
http://www.hawaiienergypolicy.hawai...ve-briefings/_downloads/2017-march-Reeves.pdf
The barriers to entry in packaging other people cells are low. It is like installing solar panels. Many competitors will enter and drive margins low.
mmd
Active Member
I am sure, if you called Wedbush 2 years ago, they would have told you a story more interesting than yours, why GPRO would go to those lofty PTs. When you are in the hype, how can you tell if it is hype or not?
Last I checked, Tesla makes cars, electric cars that existed 100 years ago and billions exist in the world today. Tesla is not really ushering in a new age of smart phone. But I admit, Tesla has created a brand image, at least here in California. The problem is, its products are too expensive, and is supported by $10k rebates and HOV lane access in CA (to disappear in Jan 2019).
If you think Tesla depends on subsidies, you haven't done one single whit of research about Tesla at all.
..
The United States of subsidies: The biggest corporate winners in each state
If you, mmd, think that all of these companies are worthless subsidy hogs which nobody in their right mind should invest in... OK, then I will respect your opinion on Tesla too
You need to look at per car subsidy, as a percentage of the price of the product. It's not just me thinking. Check the Supernova effect in Denmark. Without huge subsidies, sales of electric cars (including Tesla's) just imploded. If people really bought these because they liked it a lot and because the product was appealing on its own, sales wouldn't have imploded like that.
Now wait for the same effect in Hong Kong. Expiring incentives pull in demand in 2 ways:
a) Pull forward demand from customers who might buy in the future.
b) Pull in demand from dealers, scalpers and possibly Tesla's own stores to buy cheap when they can. These will be sold later for few quarters at profit, till depreciation catches up. But those won't be Tesla's new sales.
We will see the Supernova effect in Hong Kong in Q1 and Q2. After that, be ready to see 6% of Tesla global sales vanish into thin air.
Elon seems fascinated with buying expensive properties instead. Is he colonizing Bel Aire first?
Elon Musk Picks Up Fifth Multi-Million Dollar Property in Bel Air (EXCLUSIVE)
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I don't expect that Tesla is the only energy storage provider. But it is likely one of the best. Samsung SDI's overall capacity will be far more limited than Tesla's. As is LG Chem's and others. One of Tesla's not-so-secret sauces is to utilize the demand of both long distance BEVs and stationary storage to de-risk the building of battery cell production. Plenty of Asian companies have suffered through demand drops and caused them to both bleed red ink and cap the investment into capacity. But by having low cost and high energy battery cells that are about to disrupt two different massive industries, Tesla is a leader in both.
In some cases, we might see AES actually installing Tesla PowerPacks. There's a bunch of scenarios where that might make sense.
I don't have any evidence other than Musk's hints for this, but I believe the Kauai Solarcity/PowerPack project is one of the big reasons why Musk chose to combine with SolarCity. While he did mention having to pitch the project to both board of directors as a problem, there were undoubtedly issues with projects like this as two different companies.
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Yeah -- it remains to be seen how much of an advantage Tesla's aggressive vertical integration will give it over the "multi layer repackaging" business model with a "system integrator" buying parts from loads of suppliers each of which has their own profit margin and overhead.
I personally suspect it will be an advantage for Tesla, but it does have disadvantages too, so it could be the other way around. Whether vertical integration makes more money or less money has varied by industry and by decade, so it's not a sure thing either way. Complicated to look at.
Roughly 0%.
Anyone with less than a certain taxable income in most states in the US gets nothing.
In China, no subsidies and a giant tarriff.
No subsidies in Australia or New Zealand or most of Europe.
The base price of Model S has actually been increased by more than the US federal tax credit value since it was initially released.
Oil gets bigger US subsidies as a percentage of the price of the product, from the submarket lease rates on federal land alone.
Military contractors who produce equipment that doesn't work are getting >100% subsidies on "cost plus" contracts.
You can't just look at countries which suddenly eliminated their car subsidy, because *obviously* people who were going to buy next month, or two months from now, will accelerate their purchases and buy this month instead. This has nothing at all to do with the long-run trendline; you just get six months or a year of sales crunched in all at once before the deadline. Then you go back to the trend. Denmark Tesla sales are back, you know.
We've had *multiple rounds of this* with the pending expirations of tax breaks for solar panels (which were always cancelled at the last minute). Vast amounts of demand was pulled forward into the year before expiration, the year after the planned (cancelled) expiration was low, and then the year after that -- right back to trend.
Next question? I don't think I'm going to get through your totally closed mind, but it's sort of fun demolishing your silliness.
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