And this is the only real-time data point that we got from tftf ever. In the past he mentioned how he made money in TSLA using perfect hindsight and what he wrote is so fantastically unbelievable that I am sure that he left out a bunch of losing trades along the way.
I would like to see tftf continue posting his trades here in real-time, because I think that would be beneficial to everyone on this forum; especially if he is shorting TSLA (it is good to see a short's thought .
About data points: It's not the only one, you can follow the link in the first post and see that I closed my last short position back in November around $121. It's time-stamped in this forum. Many of my earlier trades are also time-stamped on SA in comments.
I'm ok to post my TSLA trades in this thread on the same day as I open and close them (As you can see from my trade history, I only do a few over weeks or even months, I wouldn't even call it trading).
Some generic points:
1. I'm doing this for information purposes so that you can get an insight what a person on the other side of the trade thinks, that's all.
Shorting is risky. As a rule of thumb, a single short position is only 1% of my portfolio and my overall short position is around 5% (around 10% was the all-time-high).
My last trade at $198 was 0.5x (50% of a normal-sized short-trade as indicated, where x is about 1% of the portfolio size).
2. I'm the first to admit that I was also lucky last year. First, if not for the fire incidents the stock would have never come down so much (and I always maintained the fire incident reactions were overblown, you can check my post history. I entered my shorts before). Second, I was lucky to catch the bottom towards the end of November 2013. But I also have some experience in the markets.
3. Many shorts are not well-informed regarding TSLA details. I say that as a short. These were mostly the ones shorting at $20-30, I was long at that time. I followed TSLA since before the IPO and I have no problem going long again should the stock ever fall back to the $50-70 range (I realize these prices are highly unlikely short-term, many longs probably believe we will never see them again).
The issue persists to this day. For example, in the CNBC video below the fundamentals guest seems to mix up TSLA gross margin targets (25%) with net or operating margins from German competitors like BMW or Daimler:
They're talking about margins of 25% on their Model S. When you consider what BMW and Mercedes are doing, their margins are in the 5.8% to 6.5% range."
This chart says Tesla is cheap | Talking Numbers - Yahoo Finance
He's talking about different margins which of course is mixing apples and oranges (but I agree with some of the other points he makes).
So in the same way I called out a long analyst in the past (Andrea James) I have no trouble saying the same for analysts on the short side.
4. I see many stocks, especially the tech sector as overvalued at the moment (TWTR, YELP...). I wouldn't single out TSLA. I see the overall stock market ripe for a correction in the coming months (new FED chair Yellen can probably add some injury time). I see the upcycle in US stock market that started in March 2009 on its last legs. This is my generic reason to focus more on shorting in 2014-2015.
5. I hope this thread can remain civil (The moderators turned my post into a thread of its own). Since the TSLA battery factory announcements could be made public sooner than expected and I started a new position, I thought it was a good time to come back actively as earlier indicated. I will only comment on these two topics (stock positions and battery factory/mass-market strategy) and stay out of other threads. (Hope that reduces moderation work to an absolute minimum).
