Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable

[ByeByeJohnny]

By the way. I assume the German markets will be open today. Does that mean they will do a premarket as usual or is that cancelled with the US market closed? I know it's very low volume anyway but still, could have been some kind of indication. There's also various certificates traded in various other European markets that I assume will be tradeable as usual.

 

[Mich]

By the way. I assume the German markets will be open today. Does that mean they will do a premarket as usual or is that cancelled with the US market closed? I know it's very low volume anyway but still, could have been some kind of indication. There's also various certificates traded in various other European markets that I assume will be tradeable as usual.

Those European certificates are open today but AFAIK the trades are not accepted when you try to place an order

 

[printf42]

How high has the stress level got to be for those poor software engineers? I assume this is related to having to integrate subsystems from multiple suppliers. This is a major advantage of Tesla that is often under appreciated. It doesn’t matter how good the programmers are if the overall architecture is a mess.

Does anyone remember the roll-out of Obamacare when only SIX people were able to actually sign up on the first day? Solving that required tearing the whole thing down and building it again from scratch.

I think that the prospects for VW navigating out of this quagmire really depends on how the management leads and the ratio of teamwork to finger pointing. If T/F >1, they have a solid chance.

I feel for them, I could imagine when engineers propose a solution which is like completely rewriting something they got from a vendor, and someone from higher up shot down the idea and said “no you have to use them, go figure”. Then what they came up would cost 10x the effort and only would work half as well, just to work around the piece that does not fit in, without removing that piece all together.

 

[dc_h]

What I don't understand is that the VW advertising material has an image of their ID.3 (IMHO I love the design) as per below.
View attachment 502327

Yet all the photos I've seen (including the article you attached) of the parked ID.3s look like this (IMHO ghastly), with small front grill, gaping bottom lip, and front corner two part window mullions that will be horrible for visibility when turning. Did they really turn a stunning EV beauty of a prototype into a plain jane ICE looking car?
View attachment 502328

VW, What have you done?!

VW Bolt. They’re not broken, they’re hiding!

 

[Rammstein]

Update :

Anyone got HW3 retrofit yet?

It took 4 days. That is not something that can be easily scaled up. Hope they can reduce the time ...

I got my windshield replaced on Friday and they put the fsd computer in while my car was there. Didn’t seem to take much time at all.

 

[Artful Dodger]

By the way. I assume the German markets will be open today. Does that mean they will do a premarket as usual or is that cancelled with the US market closed? I know it's very low volume anyway but still, could have been some kind of indication. There's also various certificates traded in various other European markets that I assume will be tradeable as usual.

Frankfurt should be open.
2020 Frankfurt Stock Exchange (FSX) Holidays | TradingHours.com

 

[EVNow]

I got my windshield replaced on Friday and they put the fsd computer in while my car was there. Didn’t seem to take much time at all.

That is a very isolated anecdotal peice of evidence to draw a conclusion on. Was with a friend last night and we were going to grab food in his X and he mentioned how they retrofitted his X with Hardware 3.0 when he brought it in for another issue. Got the X back in the same day.

What car do you have?

Speculation is that older 3s are taking more time.

 

[sundaymorning]

No more ugly vans for SpaceX crews.

No astrovans for SpaceX, crews riding to rockets in Teslas

More free advertisements.

 

[new_sneakers]

TSLA in Frankfurt market is trading around $505.

 

[Fact Checking]

What car do you have?

Speculation is that older 3s are taking more time.

Fortunately due to the slow Model 3 ramp-up 90%+ of the Model 3's were made in the last ~12-16 months.

 

[kengchang]

TSLA in Frankfurt market is trading around $505.

Is there any volume at all?

 

[Fact Checking]

If Tesla has the option to transfer these earnings to the US, does it have to transfer the cash as well?

Since until now they had all production and most expenses in Fremont, Palo Alto and GF1, I'm pretty sure they transferred most EU and China income to the U.S. to balance their accounts. There might be some European and Chinese suppliers they paid in Euros and Yuan, directly from local income, but about 75% of their CoGs is on an USD basis I think, 95%+ of their R&D is in the U.S. and I'd say at least 70% of their SG&A.

This practice can be seen in frequent occurrences of delayed cash flow at the end of quarters, and in one case Tesla IIRC commented that they have 20 days of clearing delays from some European banks?

That would seem like a bad idea, because it's going to need local cash in the EU and China to build Giga 3 and Giga 4.

They are building GF3 from local loans from local banks - the reported draw-down on those credit lines seems to be rough in line with their estimated China specific capex.

So I'd guess that much of their tax liabilities are in the U.S., and since they didn't have to pay much in taxes due to persistent losses, there was no real problem in transferring income back to the U.S. When large U.S. corporations are parking non-U.S. income abroad it's usually done to avoid taxation.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Is max pain still sitting at $460 or did it move up during today's trading?
Where do you get the max pain info from?
Thanks!

Max pain is calculated once per day (overnight) then available for TSLA here: (its the bottommost of the three charts shown)

Opricot Open Interest|Volume|Max Pain

Also note the 'pick-list' of Expiry Dates at the top-right of the page. You can use it to display CALLS and PUTS for any future expiry date.

Note also that there is no HISTORY available through this service. On Friday's at about 8 PM EST (New York time), the default view on that page automatically rolls forward to the next closest future options expiry date.

HTH.

Cheers!

 

[Aeon]

Europe just pulled a 180.
Now sky's the limit ;-)
~510$

 

[Fact Checking]

Europe just pulled a 180.
Now sky's the limit ;-)
~510$

View attachment 502394

And this happened while macros are a bit red in European and Asian trading - i.e. this +1.6% TSLA up-move from €354 ($504) to €361 ($512) in European trading is Tesla specific.

TSLA closed at $510 on Friday, but in after-hours dropped to $504. So Frankfurt first opened at around the Nasdaq after-hours price of $504, but then rose back above the Friday closing price.

It's low liquidity, low volume trading though: around 5,000 shares traded so far - this is typical in the Frankfurt session when Nasdaq is closed.

 

[ReflexFunds]

Some interesting Reddit comments on Model Y:

Yaro_S:
"They are training techs already how to work on it. Delivered will start soon. No later than 1 month.
Model Y has a few major changes. No PTC heater, radiator and condenser built into the car instead of being in the front like a traditional car. The car will reuse a lot of energy. Model 3 will eventually get these changes too and will probably get increased range."
"It'll still have a radiator but be somewhere in the car instead of in the front. Supposedly it'll use the heat from battery and drive unit. It will use the ac compressor for the heat also."
Rumored "confirmation" from employee that Model Y deliveries start in a couple weeks (soon after Earnings Report on 1/29) : teslamotors

 

[RobStark]

My estimate said it would take around 170,000 ZEVs to zero out FCA's 2020 penalty. If they were smart, they would have arranged to grab every Tesla credit in the EU.

And FCA is merging with PSA.

PSA will not sell enough BEV/PHEV to avoid EU fines either.

 

[Fact Checking]

And FCA is merging with PSA.

PSA will not sell enough BEV/PHEV to avoid EU fines either.

PSA-FCA merger is not expected to close until end of this year - so in 2020 it's mostly FCA that Tesla is going to pool with - in 2021 I suppose the whole PSA-FCA conglomerate will be part of the pool - unless they intentionally leave Tesla with the FCA corporate identity. (Which would be stupid from their perspective.)

 

[lklundin]

If true, they're going to owe a fortune to the EU re: emissions this year.

It's bad enough to be under serious time pressure for mechanical engineering, but for a company inexperienced in software engineering such serious pressure also with regards to money and public image and surely involving desperate, upper management scrutiny can very well lead to software of a disastrous quality.

In fact, the ID.3 now looks like a typical setup for a software project heading towards complete chaos and abysmal performance.

I am starting to be _really_ worried and actually depressed about Germany's industrial future and I will just throw in this anecdote:

The other day the BMW-driving neighbor walks by beaming while saying that now the German competition in the BEV-arena is arriving. He then proceeds to show me a box with a Porsche Taycan complete with (a no-name) charging stall - as a Playmobil kit for his little son... This was one of very few occasions where I was literally lost for words.

 

[Fact Checking]

The other day the BMW-driving neighbor walks by beaming while saying that now the German competition in the BEV-arena is arriving. He then proceeds to show me a box with a Porsche Taycan complete with (a no-name) charging stall - as a Playmobil kit for his little son... This was one of very few occasions where I was literally lost for words.

Ha! You could reply that in this form factor the Taycan is indeed perfect: should it run out of charge it can be carried to the nearest charger no problem.