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

[lafrisbee]

Did____________ announce anything? (asking for a friend)


~~~Tell your friend that is why the Resources Angle thread exists and is why the Investor Thread is TRIED, by Moderators, to keep clear of these statements, questions and other such info

But you knew that already~~~~

I was trying to be funny. But you were even more entertaining... But would that not be relevant to Tesla's Stock? It also was a devilish play towards validating (or not) the 10,000 acres in Nevada that tesla has the rights to mine.

 

[pz1975]

I don't often buy weekly calls, but next week's expiring calls are setting up as a great risk:benefit proposition:

1. Macros are up significantly more than TSLA would normally be on such a day - likely due to max pain capping at 400-405.
2. There is a decent chance that the quarterly delivery report will come out next Friday before open and I don't think the IV (which has been dropping) currently reflects the % chance of that happening. The options are trading at lower premiums than I think they should be. October 9 calls (450 and 500) are trading at 2.8x and 4.5x October 2 calls, respectively.
3. "Moon Monday" seems to be a thing (thanks @Papafox for another great TSLA meme) and I expect a rise Monday unless the macros don't cooperate.

Oct 2 calls at $450 (currently at 4.10) and $500 (currently at $0.85) are my targets, and I plan to pick up 25 of the former and 50 of the latter. I'm going to wait until 15 mins before close as there may be a late-day rise and I want to get them before that.

 

[tinyrodent]

Giga Berlin weekend update. Lightning rods installed at the switchyard. Exterior of drive unit building almost complete.

 

[Singuy]

I run a company in the energy sector. A colleague runs a company in the automotive sector. About 3-4 years ago we were chewing over Tesla and I showed him some of my projections and asked him what he thought of them. His answer was that Tesla had approached them to do something (I know what it was, but I can't tell you exactly what) and they'd looked at the project/business opportunity vs the other opportunities they had. They declined Tesla and went with the other ones precisely because they could foresee that they would spend several years and a whole lot of €€€ and effort and etc, and then Tesla would mirror it and dump them. They did just fine with their other projects in the subsequent years. I am sure he was not the only 'partner' that chose not to participate. I'm not saying Tesla is wrong either, simply that a) there are pros and cons, and b) don't make the mistake of thinking that Tesla has a monopoly on intelligent, thoughtful, far-sighted talent.

Seems a little short sighted and in this kind of environment when dealing with a highly vertically integrated company, I would think the best business plan is to join them vs fighting them. Because the end result is always the same, they figure out what you were providing and they will do it better and cheaper. That's just inevitable. The smart way to do business is to negotiate and innovate with them, making yourself indispensable as a partner and maybe even have a buy out opportunity. If you see the writing on the wall, then be glad that Tesla approached you first and you are willing to give them a price that they figured going inhouse is roughly the same if you were to take over that part of x, y and z.

Either way once Tesla figures it out, your company is done. And this is why sitting on fatter margins and unwilling to roll with the punches bankrupt companies.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Tesla long-term growth rate from 200GWh in 2022 to 3TWh in 2030 is about 40% per year or doubling every 2 years.

Thanks for your well reasoned comment. Together with some modeling, I think we can arrive at a good estimate.

To be clear, Tesla's goal for bty cell production in 2022 is 100GWh, The figure cited of 200 GWh includes Tesla's bty cells AND another 100 GWh purchased from 3rd parties (Pana, CATL, LG, maybe a few others...)

So our Model must produce a production curve that passes through 100 GWh in 2022, and 3,000 GWh by (or slightly before) 2030.

I'll put some more effort into it this weekend.

Cheers!

 

[printf42]

Maybe inclusion will be announced this afternoon? You never know!

You jinxed it.

I was hoping no one mentions spoon today.

 

[computerchuck]

Yeah, the manips took over, so obvious.

Not clear yet if $400 or $405 is the target though.

The risk for them is that we often get some Monday FOMO late on Fridays towards the end, this week the P&D speculators might jump in too.

 

[ggr]

Semi-Mod: it's too hard to go back and delete the political posts, but any going forward will be deleted. --ggr.

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

I was assuming $1bn capex per 100,000 cars/year from cell onwards (i.e. excluding cells). It seems to me that as they lower the capex/car they are using the capex budget that comes free to further vertically integrate and control the whole stack. For 100k cars that is 10GWh cells @100KWH/car. So the $1bn per 10GWh of cell lines may partially overlap with my prior assumption and depending on the extent to which it does I may need to revisit my calcs for not requiring any additional capital to enable 40-50%yoy growth. The extent to which that is true is also dependent on how much of the additional margin they choose to pass to consumers in price decreases, and how much they choose to retain internally for growth.

They can't overlap, since your assumption explicitly said "excluding cells". But, IF you mis-wrote and you meant "the $1bn per 10GWh of battery packs may partially overlap", then yes that's possible, and would align with what I wrote in response to Dodger.

By "additional capex to enable 40-50% yoy growth", did you mean "on top of the $3B" that they budgeted for 2020? I don't think that would be necessary, since the capex can only go into factory/production expansion. Once all the factories are done (whether it's 800k this year, or 20 million in 2030), the capex budget would be zero. By its nature, any budgeted capex is for growing production.

 

[Discoducky]

Battery day thoughts and the impact on Tesla financials. Summary: I'm HODL and continuing to acquire on dips

First off the presentation was geared way in the direction of engineering and thus has most likely gone over the heads of most people. This is not a bad thing, but rather a very normal thing for Tesla. As this was the most likely outcome; all is right with the universe. Tesla demonstrated the tech with The Plaid S and thus continued in the tradition of leading the acceleration of sustainable transportation.

What was wholly unexpected was the massive decrease in costs for batteries as well as manufacturing facilities. This, for me, was unexpected, and honestly brought me so much joy. The presentation might have well been called "We've set a date for the end of oil". As an engineer who is fairly versed in Tesla tech, the only thing stopping Tesla at this point are force majeurs and macros of the like.

The quick summary. Tesla showed tech that is well beyond anything that has been put in any presentation or white paper and will exist in the world in a time-frame that is even close to tech demonstrated. If anyone knows of anything better please forward.

The dry electrode innovation alone is at least 10 years ahead of anything else. Why 10 years? In order to do what has just been demonstrated, even though it is about 2 years away from mass production is this: To start this process you need to attract the top battery talent, establish a think tank/brainstorming/iteration lab, try and fail on soooo many possible ways to get more efficiency out of the process which involves great amounts of money, time and patience ( Why patience? So many options in batteries end up being low production value but are initially great due to potential).

Just this innovation alone would secure a lead in the EV industry. However, so much more was shown with very reasonable timelines. Crazy that they have also gone to the extent of greatly improving the cathode production process. I had no idea how involved this was.

I think my favorite hidden gem was the slide that separated the types of new batteries into long cycle life, long range and mass sensitive. It is a lovely easter egg to the million mile battery (aka 4000 charge/discharge cycles), which to Tesla, is already in production as LFP in China and not a huge deal for this presentation.

Oh, and one more thing. It seems that Tesla has taken every page out of Apple's playbook.

1. Custom ASICs, designing own boards
2. Building SW and service stack to fully communicate back to custom infrastructure
3. Make changes to the supply chain to the lowest common supplier

However, TSLA is now adding pages

1. Objectionable best in class product; measurable features like range, acceleration, cargo space, safety...etc
2. Objectionable best in class value; measurable from cost, margins, free cash flow
3. AI custom ASICs for both training (Dojo) and serving (in car ASICs)
4. Leader in glass tech (coming with Cybertruck)
5. Leader in car entertainment
6. Leader in subscription services
7. Taking core tech in the power grid with utility scale and residential scale storage
8. Credit money from other car companies
9. I'm sure I left out many others

 

[elasalle]

Maybe inclusion will be announced this afternoon? You never know!

 

[Christine600]

The Battle of cents.

 

[Lycanthrope]

Battery day thoughts and the impact on Tesla financials. Summary: I'm HODL and continuing to acquire on dips

First off the presentation was geared way in the direction of engineering and thus has most likely gone over the heads of most people. This is not a bad thing, but rather a very normal thing for Tesla. As this was the most likely outcome; all is right with the universe. Tesla demonstrated the tech with The Plaid S and thus continued in the tradition of leading the acceleration of sustainable transportation.

What was wholly unexpected was the massive decrease in costs for batteries as well as manufacturing facilities. This, for me, was unexpected, and honestly brought me so much joy. The presentation might have well been called "We've set a date for the end of oil". As an engineer who is fairly versed in Tesla tech, the only thing stopping Tesla at this point are force majeurs and macros of the like.

The quick summary. Tesla showed tech that is well beyond anything that has been put in any presentation or white paper and will exist in the world in a time-frame that is even close to tech demonstrated. If anyone knows of anything better please forward.

The dry electrode innovation alone is at least 10 years ahead of anything else. Why 10 years? In order to do what has just been demonstrated, even though it is about 2 years away from mass production is this: To start this process you need to attract the top battery talent, establish a think tank/brainstorming/iteration lab, try and fail on soooo many possible ways to get more efficiency out of the process which involves great amounts of money, time and patience ( Why patience? So many options in batteries end up being low production value but are initially great due to potential).

Just this innovation alone would secure a lead in the EV industry. However, so much more was shown with very reasonable timelines. Crazy that they have also gone to the extent of greatly improving the cathode production process. I had no idea how involved this was.

I think my favorite hidden gem was the slide that separated the types of new batteries into long cycle life, long range and mass sensitive. It is a lovely easter egg to the million mile battery (aka 4000 charge/discharge cycles), which to Tesla, is already in production as LFP in China and not a huge deal for this presentation.

Oh, and one more thing. It seems that Tesla has taken every page out of Apple's playbook.

1. Custom ASICs, designing own boards
2. Building SW and service stack to fully communicate back to custom infrastructure
3. Make changes to the supply chain to the lowest common supplier

However, TSLA is now adding pages

1. Objectionable best in class product; measurable features like range, acceleration, cargo space, safety...etc
2. Objectionable best in class value; measurable from cost, margins, free cash flow
3. AI custom ASICs for both training (Dojo) and serving (in car ASICs)
4. Leader in glass tech (coming with Cybertruck)
5. Leader in car entertainment
6. Leader in subscription services
7. Taking core tech in the power grid with utility scale and residential scale storage
8. Credit money from other car companies
9. I'm sure I left out many others

F*** me, you can't post stuff like that, 3 minutes before close on a Friday

Looks like the Monday FOMO crowd came back from the pub...

 

[bkp_duke]

The Battle of cents.

In the last second someone looks to be trying to piss into the cheerios and push the price up.

 

[Lycanthrope]

Semi-Mod: it's too hard to go back and delete the political posts, but any going forward will be deleted. --ggr.

Grumpy mod, lazy mod, pfff....

 

[Lycanthrope]

Yeah, bought a 2/10 c450 towards the close for shits'n'giggles

 

[computerchuck]

In the last second someone looks to be trying to piss into the cheerios and push the price up.

...or piss on your leg and tell you it's raining

 

[Artful Dodger]

the DBE compacts and speeds-up the manufacturing, reduces Capex setting up the Iines, less operational waste, etc., but doesn't add to the cell performance, or if it does, this wasn't stated.

We know this to be true for the DBE process from information previously disclosed by Maxwell Technologies. The key performance benefit is the ability to create thicker electrode layers with the same ion conductivity as those achieved with the existing wet slurry process.

Maxwell Technology already identified a 25% energy density improvement (from 250 wh/kg to 300 wh/kg) just with the 1st gen of their DBE process (this is Maxwell's Slide 10 from the Needham Conference, Jan 2019):

Tesla worked with Maxwell for years verifying the DBE process before buying the company. IMHO, "calendaring" (essentially what the DBE process does) isn't that hard (click image below to download the PDF from PowerSourceConference.com):



Imma call it now: Elon is sandbagging it. Telsa will dominate batteries.

Cheers!

 

[humbaba]

after market....

If someone wants a counter example where the market makers don't get what they want -- well, look at $NKLA

There are quite some puts that are in the money with stock at <$20 and max pain at $26. Interestingly, both calls and puts have spikes at $20, but as $NKLA failed to even break $20 by close the puts have clearly won the day.

caveat: the option information is from yesterday's close and today's action may have shifted the balance toward $20 for all I know.

 

[mrmage]

I don't often buy weekly calls, but next week's expiring calls are setting up as a great risk:benefit proposition:

1. Macros are up significantly more than TSLA would normally be on such a day - likely due to max pain capping at 400-405.
2. There is a decent chance that the quarterly delivery report will come out next Friday before open and I don't think the IV (which has been dropping) currently reflects the % chance of that happening. The options are trading at lower premiums than I think they should be. October 9 calls (450 and 500) are trading at 2.8x and 4.5x October 2 calls, respectively.
3. "Moon Monday" seems to be a thing (thanks @Papafox for another great TSLA meme) and I expect a rise Monday unless the macros don't cooperate.

Oct 2 calls at $450 (currently at 4.10) and $500 (currently at $0.85) are my targets, and I plan to pick up 25 of the former and 50 of the latter. I'm going to wait until 15 mins before close as there may be a late-day rise and I want to get them before that.

I bought calendar spreads the past couple weeks for Oct 2 / Oct 16, at strikes from 450, 470, 500, and 540.

I just discovered that SP 420 is the breakeven for these. I'm not superstitious though. Throwing salt over my shoulder daily should ward off evil spirits. Looking forward to another wild week in TSLA-world and solid P&D numbers.