I've had vast amounts in cash for a long time, through the entire bull market, so you might guess that my macro prognostications have been more negative than they should have been. So ignore my thoughts. They're not investment advice.
I tend to ignore macro trends unless they have a direct impact on the earnings of a company I own stock in, and frankly I think Tesla is immune to the macro trends right now, because Tesla is eating the *top end* of the car market, which is not nearly as influenced by general unemployment levels etc. as the rest of the market.
Anyway, I've been sucking up information on the state of the oil, natgas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, battery, and electric car markets.
Oil I've figured out; it'll stay low for a while, and then creep back up as the fracked wells deplete, but be unable to get a sustained runup due to the inroads of electric vehicles and electric heat-pump heating. Volumes will drop and eventually it'll become a niche fuel. Alternatives to oil have cheaper TCO in every single use case except airplanes -- even with $20/bbl oil -- and they can't produce oil much cheaper than $20/bbl, so that's it for oil. It's just a question of how long it takes.
Coal I've figured out. Thermal coal is dead; even with a price of $0 at the minehead, the transportation cost makes it expensive at the power plant, and with very few exceptions it's cheaper to run natgas plants (and will continue to be even if natgas prices rise), cheaper to build wind turbines, cheaper to build solar farms, cheaper to build transmission lines, and of course coal has huge mercury and other toxic emissions which people are not going to tolerate much longer.
Nuclear has priced itself completely out of the market and (sigh) taxpayers will probably have to pay to clean it up.
Solar will keep following Swanson's Law. The excessive prices for rooftop solar in the US will eventually match those in Germany or Australia. It'll keep being installed at a roughly exponential rate.
Wind is already the cheapest form of electricity production and will get cheaper, so it'll keep on being installed at an exponential rate.
I'm sure y'all have already analyzed electric cars; suffice it to say they'll sell as fast as they can be produced.
Batteries will have a good "learning curve" on price and will immediately be adopted to replace "peaker" gas plants, and in remote "grid edge" locations, and to cut off "peak load" charges, and they'll just start showing up everywhere after a while.
The Natgas is the stumper which I can't predict. I know production will drop as the fracked wells run out and aren't replaced, which should bring the price up, but I can't figure out the demand profile. It competes with other electricity generation *and* it competes directly with oil for industrial feedstock *and* it competes for heating, which could lead to some very complex moves as businesses switch back and forth between alternatives; its behavior depends on the relative timing of the other trends. Shifts to and from natgas can delay or accelerate the other trends too, though.
All of this is fairly immune to the overall macro trend. A poor world economy means lower demand for everything, a strong world economy means higher demand for everything, but the substitution effects -- removing oil usage, adding solar and wind usage -- march on regardless. Except for natgas, where the demand shifts can swing the price to places which change the economics of substituting, which is why I'm not sure about natgas.
My core TSLA shares are based on my calculation of how much money they can make selling cars in 2018. I see no reason to change my position, since I don't need that money before 2018. If you need the money before then, you may have to do something else, of course.