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RobStark
Well-Known Member
Elon reiterated this at the roadshow for new Tesla Bonds in Manhattan Monday.
Many thought he backtracked with the announcement Model Y would be based on the Model 3. That is incorrect.
jelloslug
Active Member
Unfortunately, the MB 48 volt system is not replacing the 12 volt system in that car.
This site (Funds Holding TSLA) provides more detailed view of institutional ownership for TSLA.
Not sure where they get their data but they also list Call/Put holdings for individual hedge funds (Scroll to bottom for biggest Put holders).
Seems like these banks are net short TSLA: UBS (-$397 mil), Barclays (-$214 mil), Citigroup (-$23 mil) as of 03/31 2017.
Not sure where they get their data but they also list Call/Put holdings for individual hedge funds (Scroll to bottom for biggest Put holders).
Seems like these banks are net short TSLA: UBS (-$397 mil), Barclays (-$214 mil), Citigroup (-$23 mil) as of 03/31 2017.
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ValueAnalyst
Closed
I expect short interest below 10% and smear pieces to disappear by end-18.
Really? I project things differently.
Tesla will always trade on future earnings, because it will always be out-innovating its competition. If its successful in 2018, its share price will reflect its business in 2019-2020. That means it won't be valued at a P/E of 10, like all its competition and like all the accountants want it to be. It'll again be valued at "Amazon" levels. And, as such, there will always be people who think it's vastly overvalued. I don't think the short interest ever goes away.
The smear pieces disappear when the auto industry pivots and there's more than one anti-oil, anti-ICE target. I think we're still a couple of years away from that as well.
Let's compare notes at the end of next year.
lols, I know, a few months ago you bet me it would be under 10% by the end of this year never to rise above 10% again. well, with "end-18," you're moving more in agreement to my position now (fwiw, sounded like you are moving closer to my view on our other bet as well from what you wrote the other day about your surprise at how slowly the rest of the automakers are moving to EVs ; ).
I hope you are right on all this, but, for over 5 years that I've been watching Tesla extremely closely, the short position has been there the whole time, never dipping to market norms, and the FUD has only gotten far more aggressive with time.
A significant drop in short interest by EOY 2018 wouldn't surprise me. If Tesla delivers on Elon's guidance of 500K Model 3 run rate at 25% GM (and I think it will) it could get very ugly for shorts. Of course, if the SP shoots up a new round of people shouting "bubble stock" could pile in.
I would love for the smear pieces and social media shenanigans to disappear but I agree with @SteveG3 and @Alketi that likely has as much to do with legacy ICE interests as people who are genuinely short the stock. I don't see that going away any time soon. My impression (which could be wrong) is that FUD has increased since the Model 3 handover event, perhaps because the threat is now more tangible.
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Well let's think this through...
I think by "we," you mean the ~10-20 people here on TMC that know the company inside out and have researched every possible detail to no end for the last decade. Majority of lurkers here probably joined in the last twelve months, and don't know as much about Tesla as you do. Therefore, it makes sense that you may be able to ask "much better questions that any of the analysts" who cover dozens of companies simultaneously and are being pulled in a million directions because research is not their only responsibility (think client meetings and so on).
So, ok, I vote for you to join the earnings calls, but what qualifies you? You, like many retail investors or RIAs, are not representing hundreds of millions of dollars, yes? So if we add you to these calls, then we have to add thousands of other retail investors across the world who have one share of TSLA. Chaos.
I think Berkshire tries the best by webcasting their annual meetings, but Tesla did that too... Earnings calls are great, and Elon is always on Twitter. The VAST MAJORITY of material information for long-term investors is disseminated publicly via SEC filings, tweets, webcasts, and news websites. I'm also grateful for Electrek @FredLambert.
I think the playing field is pretty level for long-term investors, but I think a good next step on Tesla's part would be to make the transcript of the meeting and/or the road show presentation slides available, but I don't fully know what the implications of this would be. This may not even be possible or advisable. So I don't know. One thing I do know for certain, however, is that this is not an easy problem to solve, and that Tesla is doing a much better job at leveling the playing field than many others. An order of magnitude better.
This is about the 4th time in the past 5 years that Tesla has effectively selectively released material information in a private setting without a press release for the rest of us at the same time.
Tesla is very transparent to us all about long term goals and strategy. That is very helpful to us as investors. The level playing field I understood Techmaven to be bringing up was about releasing material information to everyone at the same time. I've only followed one other company this closely before, but, my sense is that Tesla slips up on this far more than the average company. Again, in the past 5+ years, I've seen this happen at least 4 times. Perhaps this is "an order of magnitude better" for those inside the meetings, the opposite of a level playing field. To be fair, Tesla is under far more of a microscope than most companies, so, maybe this is all part of Wall Street's unwritten rules and typically goes unreported. I realize this may have been the first time you experienced this, so, I can see why you might of thought tech was overstating things. Over several years, we've seen a strong pattern.
I don't know exactly what is wink wink, nod nod, re complying with the rules on the book, but, I have some concerns about whether this repeated practice might bite us all in the rear one day. I take Elon as he is re speaking style (actually like it) and talking about the stock price, but I don't like this practice and have written to IR about it in the past.
Causalien
Prime 8 ball Oracle
Haven't been reading every post. Just the last page of whenever I login to reply to messages... But this sounds like we are losing the shouting war. Should I throw away the ball and don my troll slayer equipment?
if you like, but, I've found my energies are generally better spent elsewhere. fwiw, I think their over the top ramping up of shouting has gotten to the point of tending to do more harm to their own reputations than to Tesla's... like attacking a diamond with a plastic spoon ; )
No, that's actually not how costs work. You might choose to assign it that way if you're being sloppy, but that's not how it actually works.
The offset printer is capital equipment and doesn't show up in cost of goods. It should be depreciated in the manner in which it wears out. In the case of an offset printer, that's the "units of production" method.
The fact is that it cost you only the cost of power and ink to produce that neighborhood leaflet, plus wear and tear on the printer.
Marginal thinking, it's something we try to explain to economics students. And the term "gross margin" comes from marginal cost analysis.
Depreciation is only part of margin if *you've calculated it correctly*. Year-based depreciation is just wrong for large factory equipment. (Year-based depreciation is appropriate for items which are expected to become obsolete due to predictable technological or fashion changes: so if you figure a car design is only good for 5 years before people get bored with it, you would depreciate the master designs for the body panels over 5 years.)
I have been assuming, without explictly saying so, that Tesla is using well-established accounting *principles*. Which would indicate units-of-production depreciation on nearly all the equipment.
However, they may be using some sort of *stupid accounting bullshit* which is present in GAAP, which is what you are suggesting they are doing.
I realize this is very common; we already know the lease accounting is garbage (and is being changed in Jan 2019) and the revenue accounting is garbage (and is being changed in Jan 2018). The depreciation accounting may also be garbage -- I haven't checked. I probably shouldn't assume that the depreciation accounting is competent, given what I know about the way depreciation is used.
For *internal corporate business decision purposes*, one does not use phony depreciation schedules. I had to explain this to a businessman looking for venture capital last year: he was showing me spreadsheets which depreciated his assets on the standard schedules, which did NOT reflect their actual useful lives, and I said "That's useless financially. I need real estimates for the useful life, replacement schedule, failure rate." I had to explain that business accounting is not the same as "reporting standards" accounting.
No. I know what gross margin really means economically. I'm certainly not "frustrated" with it -- I know exactly what gross margin is and it's a great metric.
I do not know whether GAAP is currently accurately reporting gross margin. You are asserting that it does *not* accurately reflect gross margin. Do you understand that you are asserting this?
If you have specific references to the GAAP standards specifying depreciation procedures for the equipment, it would help. I've been assuming that they're using units-of-production depreciation, which is appropriate. You are suggesting that they're using time-based depreciation, which is not. We should be able to find this out by researching the GAAP rules.
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Now, there's something different going on if the depreciation schedule is actually correct, and Tesla *really* had a negative gross margin on storage (perhaps due to high labor costs or costs of air conditioning the factory or whatever -- real costs which happen whether or not they're manufacturing anything). I might have been wrong about what you were saying -- you might have been asserting this.
But do you get my point about depreciation? If you think they had a "negative gross margin" due to time-based depreciation schedules, that would simply be a miscalculation of gross margin: that would mean that the depreciation is being computed incorrectly. (Depreciating too fast.)
This would not surprise me. GAAP miscalculates things all the time. One of the necessary skills of an investor is to figure out when this is happening. It's typically situations where GAAP bright-line rules deviate from the actual underlying principles of accrual accounting.
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I strongly suspect not, but explaining why is another comment.
This is correct. No matter what model I come up with, energy storage has worse margins than the cars. So every battery which can go to cars should do so.
Nope. I think you're underestimating the value-add in the packaging. Remember when Tesla set fire to a Powerpack to prove its safety?
We know it was a hedge in case they were producing more batteries than they needed.
But *sigh* it's also critically important to the company's actual mission. It's the end-run around "coal-powered cars". It's part of being able to sell "the complete package". And they have a huge waiting list.
So two things are going to happen:
(1) Tesla is going to focus on its two competitive advantages:
(a) the "integrated / turnkey system"
(b) the cooled/warmed/fireproofed/stabilized pack technology, where they are *way ahead* of competitors
(2) Tesla will buy parts from the outside as much as possible and only in-house when they have to
Nope. You don't do that with a product with a long waiting list which is part of your company's mission.
Remember the Australia project is on a short timeline: 100 days. It'll take a month to ship heavy stuff to Australia and a month to install and debug; anything shorter is kind of unrealistic. So that leaves about a month to make the parts! The Gigafactory is producing some Powerwall/Powerpack cells, but apparently on the "pilot line". They're producing Model 3 cells, but rumor has it those are a different chemistry. I wouldn't be surprised if the Gigafactory simply can't produce enough cells fast enough for the Australia project at this point.
Don't be suprised if it's a mix of Samsung cells and Gigafactory cells based simply on how much can be supplied ASAP.
To emphasize the accounting issues, consider the following scenario:
Cells manufactured in Month 1 are sold in Month 2, cells manufactured in Month 2 are sold in Month 3, etc. (For clarity let's assume all sales are contracted in advance.)
In true accrual accounting, you would match the revenue for Month 2 to the cost of production of *those cells*, which were produced in Month 1.
Most reporting systems including GAAP do not do this. They adopt "practical expedients". But these practical expedients make nonsense of the accounting during a transition month when production changes substantially. This does not change the true gross margin in any way! It's the same from month to month. (What changes is the *volume*.) But the accounting standards, by mismatching the months, give a misleading picture of the true accural situation during the transition month.
GAAP is sloppy. It's a nice starting point, but it shouldn't be taken too seriously. The first edition of Benjamin Graham's _Securities Analysis_ basically consisted of how to dig through a financial report (of the time period) and recalculate real numbers from the misleading GAAP numbers. (The idea being that you spotted overpriced or underpriced companies by spotting ones where GAAP didn't match reality.)
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