Yeah this is the real white swan I have on my radar. If/when the Orange One realizes how aligned with his MAGA platform elon/TM is and tweets about it, it will set off a huge rally. So much of the short/hatred of TM has a foot in partisan alignment. If Orange signals that he supports what Elon is building that would instantly cut the knees out of the shorting crowd. Whereas if Orange says he doesn't like it, that is downside for sure but it feels like animosity is already baked in a bit. TSLA has not participated in the post election run up.
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
- Status
Yeah this is the real white swan I have on my radar. If/when the Orange One realizes how aligned with his MAGA platform elon/TM is and tweets about it, it will set off a huge rally. So much of the short/hatred of TM has a foot in partisan alignment. If Orange signals that he supports what Elon is building that would instantly cut the knees out of the shorting crowd. Whereas if Orange says he doesn't like it, that is downside for sure but it feels like animosity is already baked in a bit. TSLA has not participated in the post election run up.
Yep. Tesla has gotten a lot more secretive and good at keeping secrets over the years -- and we *know* they have indoor test tracks. There's probably an official policy to not let anyone see the test mules.
Driver Dave
Member
Those comments
The denial is strong in those...
It is like a bunch of geezers sitting around saying "people just want to make calls and they'll never fit a browser on that small screen, so flip phones are here forever!"
I really don't get the short-term market, thank good I'm long
Off Shore
Off Topic Member
Off-topic, I'm afraid the refreshed Model S is never going to garner a significant mind-share in the press. Too bad, IMO because I think it's way prettier than the nose cone (apologies and pledges of eternal love to Grace). By the time the nose cone fades away the only thing the press will use to denote generic Tesla will be the model 3.
Jonathan Hewitt
Active Member
And thank goodness Jan 2019 LEAPS are out! I'm hoping those prove to have been the most no-brainer to buy calls I've ever bought. Anything is possible, though.
Ameliorate
Member
When I was looking into the last upswing of TSLA ($100)
The short interest increased another 2.5M while the price shot up $20-30 over 2 weeks. Either to kill the move or thinking it was a false recovery. Then they finally decided to cover.
200 Might be a tough break, it probably looks like a great opportunity for shorting as they've dropped us from 200 to 180-190 multiple times already in the past months, even if they don't this time around I could see why they'd want to.
So long as we can deliver 25k+ cars this quarter, which already implies a pretty good Q4, I could see the momentum propelling us upwards again and a change in sentiment. Delivering on 80,000 would go a long ways to people believing Elons 2017 production goals, not to mention finally the death of "tesla loses money on every car it makes" if another positive quarter.
Mike Smith
Active Member
This could be the last day TSLA ever trades below $200.
Yeah, isn't that odd? As far as I can tell we have no information on the gross margins of TE, but the volume of sales appears to be substantial. Tesla hasn't advertised any of the Powerpack sales in press releases (though SolarCity did advertise one); we find out about them from random local newspapers, and there appear to be a lot of them. Even with poor margins, the small ones are a million dollars a pop; it'll take a while for the volume to add up to a huge business, but it does appear to be a cash generator from day one.
Honestly I think a lot of Wall Street doesn't believe that Tesla will repeat its operating profit in Q4. All the evidence I see says that Tesla will have a larger operating profit on a comparable basis (cars) in Q4 than in Q3, additional operating profit from batteries, and breakeven or a small operating profit from SolarCity.
Any profits are internally generated capital. It's tricky to figure out how much this defrays the need for external capital because management has been quite vague about what their capital needs are in the near term.
They said they'd spend $1 billion on capex in Q4. They already have more than that amount in cash which isn't needed for repayment of debts until 2018, by a very conservative accounting. So any Q4 profits can be directed to Q1 capex. I don't have a good sense on how big capex will be in early 2017 because management was quite vague; they said the capex expenditure rate would be larger than in Q3 2016, but not significantly larger than in Q4 2016, which leaves a huge window betwen $250 million and $1 billion per quarter. They also said that lots of capex was now actually backloaded until after Model 3 production starts (which initially seemed cryptic to me, but I figured out it has to do with supplier terms of payment getting longer and longer). Solarcity capex on the Buffalo factory is a wild card but may have been evaded by bringing in capital from Panasonic.
The delivery numbers and financial numbers don't come out before January. So while you could be right, there could also be opportunities to buy TSLA cheaply prior to those announcements.
While rocket science is older and in fact can pretty much be summarized in one equation:
The reason of said quote and also of "Space is hard" is because of the extremely low margin of error. While most projects, constructions and developments can rely on a large margin of error and hence can occasionally gloss over some shady regions of understanding, then this is not true for rocket science where any extra gram of the rocket means a lot more lost on the payload. It's a region where you have to really and truly understand what the hell you are doing or the thing just blows up (or well experiences a RUD, Rapid Unplanned Disassembly). As an example the AMOS-6 on-pad explosion came from unplanned liquid-gas dynamics that caused helium pressure vessel loading process to subcool the already subcooled oxygen below freezing temperature and cause solid oxygen crystals inside the pressure vessel liner that during expansion (pressurization) cut the fibers and ignited with carbon. It's an extreme boundary condition of interplay of complex plumbing and timing processes. That makes space hard and rocket science still being the ultimate field of knowledge.
Good points. I would note that biology is much much worse in all these regards, *and* is much more poorly understood. Due to the self-reproducing nature of most things in biology and the resulting prevalance of positive-feedback effects, a tiny change often leads to a complete phase change -- often in a system you didn't even think was related. So the ultimate field of knowledge with extreme boundary conditions is, in fact, biology.
I don't trust Musk or any of the engineers he's hired to do bioengineering, but thankfully they don't have to.
Rocket science is easy enough; that they can do.
dmckinstry
Model X 2019
I wish I had another TLSA share for every time I heard or thought that.
Gtoffo
Member
Your thought process makes a lot of sense.
However, I am struggling to figure out what aspect of "designed for ease of conventional manufacturing" would *not* also make it easier to automate manufacturing. We already know they've automated some of the bits which were thought to be really hard (like bolt attachment). Absolutely anything they do to make wiring harnesses more robot-friendly should also make them easier for humans to install, as far as I can tell...
Ameliorate
Member
Indeed and I intent to! waiting for Thurs to roll around for some money to become available. Was just trying to figure if we have the potential for another large leg up like the previous 3 +$100 runs and if some march calls might be useful, 2019's will be the majority purchase though.
on the daily chart yes...but there is resistance on the weekly chart at the 20 week MA and overhead resistance on the monthly chart at the 5 month MA..imho, it is helpful to look at charts on multiple time frames
MartinAustin
Active Member
Google forming new self-driving company called WAYMO (according to CNBC)
So... obviously not getting out of the self-driving game
So... obviously not getting out of the self-driving game
I don't see a first principle reason why Tesla would beat out Lucid Motors, except that Tesla has a decade more experience and a longer track record.
The *legacy* OEMs have several major problems:
1 -- they've outsourced everything except the ICE engines, the final assembly, and occasionally the body lines. The ICE engine knowledge is, of course, worthless. This is the "Kodak film" problem, described many times
2 -- they have a huge investment in the existing non-automated tech for the final assembly lines
3 -- their unions and existing employees will be very angry if they automate those lines (this was already an issue for GM in the 1980s, when then-chairman Roger Smith was trying to automate those lines)
There are advantages to *not* having a legacy business, and they seem particularly strong in this case.
Nothing significant, but:
Dec 13 (Reuters) - General Motors Co <GM.N> on Tuesday said
it delivered its first Chevrolet Bolt electric car to a family
in Fremont, California, home to rival electric automaker Tesla
Motors Inc's <TSLA.O> assembly plant.
Dec 13 (Reuters) - General Motors Co <GM.N> on Tuesday said
it delivered its first Chevrolet Bolt electric car to a family
in Fremont, California, home to rival electric automaker Tesla
Motors Inc's <TSLA.O> assembly plant.
Basically, the airlines have been subsidized substantially in a number of ways -- particularly the airports, but my favorite is the wonders of "bankruptcy financing" where companies which go bankrupt just keep getting more cash pumped into them by very stupid "investors". Warren Buffet has warned repeatedly that the entire airline industry has run at a loss over its entire history, overall. Amtrak from New York to Boston is run for profit and makes a profit. Yes, really. (The profits don't cover the national overhead, as I mentioned before.) They can get people to pay sky-high prices, so they do so, and they profit. Why does the P100D cost more than a Toyota? Because it's what the market will bear.
That's another story. It's true in much of the country -- though certainly not from New York to Boston. This relates to the insane system we have where the tracks are owned by private companies, which is true in pretty much *no country in the entire world* (Canada and Mexico are the only others I can think of where the tracks are mostly privately owned, and their passenger rail is just as bad and nonexistent, respectively). Everyone else nationalized the tracks. Where the tracks are owned by government, such as New York to Boston, Amtrak is typically not very late (I mean Italian rail levels of not-very-late, not Japanese punctuality).
(Actually, Mexico and Canada nationalized the tracks too, they were just idiots and later sold them off to private investors for less than they were worth. Canada actually did this *twice*. Actually, in the Northeast US, *the US nationalized the tracks too*, in Conrail, and then later sold that off to private investors for less than it was worth. There's a whole discussion possible on this bizarre philosophy of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses".)
The thing is, privately owned tracks are like privately owned roads, which approximately nobody advocates for. It just doesn't work well. England actually tried privately owned roads and gave up on them in the late 19th century. This does provide the only known test case for what you get if you have privately owned roads *and* privately owned railroads (spoiler, the railroads win). If the road system in this country were completely privately owned, Tesla wouldn't stand a chance. (That's not going to happen. I hope.)
Where the government owns the track, sometimes they do set up their own railroad (NJ Transit, etc.), and hey, sometimes they are operated better than Amtrak. But a lot of the time for smaller states like Maine or Maryland, the financial issue comes up that they don't want to cover all that *overhead* -- a maintenance base, a ticketing system, etc. It's better to defray that over lots and lots of trains. Amtrak can typically make an offer to operate the state's desired trains at marginal cost plus a small profit margin because their fixed overhead is already there and doesn't change; a competing offer would have to include a huge lump for overhead.
The economics of capital-intensive sectors of the economy which have network effects is actually fascinating. Most people don't understand it at all.
The way these economics work is also the reason almost all of the US has monopolies (occasionally duopolies) on broadband Internet, and it's more expensive Internet than in most of the world, and it's slower and less reliable; whereas places with municipal broadband have cheaper, faster, more reliable Internet *and* it tends to make a profit for the city. I'm not going to go into detail as to why this is, but if you understand this stuff, you're going to be well ahead of most investors in understanding capital-intensive sectors of the economy.
Last edited:
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
