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

[Khamul]

These two tweets might be of interest: https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1326320974489378817 and https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1326321341096714243

"Near the end of last year Elon Musk decided that he was done trying to be nice to the journalists, Vanity Fair reports, seeing them as biased against him – parting ways with a PR firm and not filling communications positions when employees left."

[The tweet is referencing a vanity fair piece on Elon that I neither have nor will read]: "A person close to Musk told Vanity Fair: “Elon is his own communications director now.” When reached for comment on this characterization, Musk responded: “Vanity Fair sucks,” attributing the quote very clearly to himself."

Edit: The tweets are from a good cnbc journalist . Yes, I know what you're thinking! That's an oxymoron! But despite my disgust for cnbc, I really enjoy his writings. He mainly reports on spacestuff, and apparently that's just not interesting to the mothership.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Vanity Fair thinks they're standing up to a bully, but really they're just taking money to print a story. Not too dissimilar from the Business Insider model sadly.

This all started when Bethany McLean stood up for Linette Lopez whom she assumed was being bullied, but was really just being called out for Ctrl-V "journalism" on behalf of Jim Chanos. Last summer McLean then took the cash as printed a Chanos article of her own in Vanity Fair, having for years written some pretty amazing stuff including unearthing the Enron scandal.

As revenue recedes, traditional print has an easier time convincing themselves it's ok to take money for printing manufactured stories from 3rd parties with nefarious motives. Sad.

All that being said, I'm still giving VF and McLean a pass on their Elon hating. No one's perfect and relative to the rest they're great.

 

[WattsHappening]

Still not getting it..

$500 calls this Friday stand at $0,13, so that's $13 per contract.. So you'd need 7 contracts or 700 shares as cover to gain about $90, against 700 shares' worth of about $290,000.. To make an 'interesting' profit of $1000/week you'd be around 7500 shares to cover 75 calls, worth $2,9m.., so on a year basis that's a gain of 0,5%.. Not that interesting, is it?

What am I missing?

This Friday is only 3 trading days away. Not nearly enough time for there to be a $100 SP move (at least these days).

Look at $500 calls a month or two out. The difference between those prices and the $0.13 for this Friday is the time premium. As time goes by and we get closer and closer to the expiration date, the time premium decreases. That is the beauty of writing covered calls. Play the other side of those who are betting on a big move up. For example, I sold a 12/11 $500 call last week for $10.25. $1,024 net after a $0.67 commission. Currently it's $5.50. Most likely, it will expire worthless in a month and I will pocket the $1K. Worst cast scenario for this trade is the stock spikes to >$500 and the stock gets called away. In that case, I'm thrilled with the rest of my Tesla holdings. I'll take that. To me, it's just an easy, free $1K.

 

[UCF3]

Still not getting it..

$500 calls this Friday stand at $0,13, so that's $13 per contract.. So you'd need 7 contracts or 700 shares as cover to gain about $90, against 700 shares' worth of about $290,000.. To make an 'interesting' profit of $1000/week you'd be around 7500 shares to cover 75 calls, worth $2,9m.., so on a year basis that's a gain of 0,5%.. Not that interesting, is it?

What am I missing?

IV is in the mid 50’s right now. That has a huge impact on call prices. IV has fluctuated all the way up past 120 in the last 10 months, which would bring in much higher premiums.

 

[dl003]

Still not getting it..

$500 calls this Friday stand at $0,13, so that's $13 per contract.. So you'd need 7 contracts or 700 shares as cover to gain about $90, against 700 shares' worth of about $290,000.. To make an 'interesting' profit of $1000/week you'd be around 7500 shares to cover 75 calls, worth $2,9m.., so on a year basis that's a gain of 0,5%.. Not that interesting, is it?

What am I missing?

Couple things:
1. Normally it is already too late to sell calls expiring this Friday. If you sold Thursday or Friday you could have got $100 per contract
2. We are in a weird period. Market is extremely volatile. The "risk" of getting admitted to the SP 500 is hanging over call sellers. TSLA's IVs are the lowest they've ever been in a long time, despite a litany of good news and impending blockbuster Q4
In short, this is a very unfriendly time for option sellers. In any other time and for any other stock with TSLA's market cap, a weekly call with strike price over 15% to the upside would be considered very safe. $100 a week, $5200 a year, or about 12% return on top of any price appreciation is nothing short of decent. Once we have got through this period and big money is back in the market and the SP debacle is behind us, it will make much more sense.

 

[StealthP3D]

Maybe a bit OT, but the new Apple CPU M1 looks pretty damned awesome. 1/4 power for same performance as latest intel, 2x top performance, 5nm. Tesla should ditch AMD and get these for their next gen MCU.

Tesla is trying to make their cars incrementally more affordable, not price themselves out of the market! The current CPU works fine and costs a fraction of what Apple would extract. If you have money to burn, buy what what you want, bit don't force every Tesla buyer to follow your lead.

 

[WattsHappening]

This Friday is only 3 trading days away. Not nearly enough time for there to be a $100 SP move (at least these days).

Look at $500 calls a month or two out. The difference between those prices and the $0.13 for this Friday is the time premium. As time goes by and we get closer and closer to the expiration date, the time premium decreases. That is the beauty of writing covered calls. Play the other side of those who are betting on a big move up. For example, I sold a 12/11 $500 call last week for $10.25. $1,024 net after a $0.67 commission. Currently it's $5.50. Most likely, it will expire worthless in a month and I will pocket the $1K. Worst cast scenario for this trade is the stock spikes to >$500 and the stock gets called away. In that case, I'm thrilled with the rest of my Tesla holdings. I'll take that. To me, it's just an easy, free $1K.

And to take it one step further, the 1/15/2021 $500 call is bid at $16.55. Or you could be more aggressive with the strike price: the 12/11 $460 call is $11. Taking the first example, if you have 700 shares, you could write one call for $16.55, pocket $1,655 for two months, and the worst cast scenario is the stock jumps and 100 shares gets called from you at a price of $500. And you are still sitting on 600 shares valued at >$500 each. Very low risk way of generating some income.

Having said that, it's not nearly as compelling of a play as it was a couple of months ago, Before battery day, trading volume was high, lots of traders were gambling and bidding up call prices. So the time premium was much greater and gains made by selling covered calls were much better. I'm hoping we get back to days like that again soon.

 

[Singuy]

Maybe a bit OT, but the new Apple CPU M1 looks pretty damned awesome. 1/4 power for same performance as latest intel, 2x top performance, 5nm. Tesla should ditch AMD and get these for their next gen MCU.

Don't look at their marketing slides without any y and x axis markers to determine anything.

The latest intel laptop chips are nothing to celebrate if you manage to beat it. AMD's 4000 series APU is 2x the speed in compute and GPU speed using the same power on 7nm. The fact that Apple is claiming similar numbers at 5nm is..fine. But unlike the M1, the AMD APU can actually run things..not specialized made final cut pro..but actually programs made for the PC in general.

 

[JRP3]

All that being said, I'm still giving VF and McLean a pass on their Elon hating

Nope, dig deep enough and you'll see McLean has been doing dirty work for Chanos for years. She's garbage. Review the Elon vs Shorts thread.

 

[amolina]

Pretty interesting discussion about the DOJO project.

There was not much new information, but here are the key takeaways:

• DOJO is Tesla's investments to get most computation per economical cost in the next few years . Cheap Computation is essential in terms pf cost and time.
• Geometric Video data for labelling Improves productivity of labellers by 100-1000 times. You don't need neural network to do the labelling. Leveraging labellers is the strategy here.
• SLAM is computationally very expensive.
• Designing HPC infrastructure is not simple. Requires lot of specialized tech. That's why DOJO project is probably taking longer than they thought.
• Key is the ability of the systems to querry the relevant/similiar data from the fleets enabling self supervision
• As the edge cases become rarer, the networks ability to detect an edge cases becomes simultaneously more powerful
• Karpathy's Data cycle seems to be 1-2 weeks long at the moment.
• Neural networks weight updates only happen with relatively big pushes.

 

[Beltsbear]

Tesla is trying to make their cars incrementally more affordable, not price themselves out of the market! The current CPU works fine and costs a fraction of what Apple would extract. If you have money to burn, buy what what you want, bit don't force every Tesla buyer to follow your lead.

The CPU unit cost Apple very little money, and it stands to reason that they would sell it at a fairly good price compared to Intel for the same kind of power. Apple is actually capable of disrupting the CPU market.

 

[Singuy]

The CPU unit cost Apple very little money, and it stands to reason that they would sell it at a fairly good price compared to Intel for the same kind of power. Apple is actually capable of disrupting the CPU market.

Except apple is not interested in general application support or hardware support. They want control and loyalties. They want developers to only develop for this processor used in their products only.

Just look at the A series of tablet chips. Ever see them in anything else that's not an apple device? You know who doesn't make money off software? AMD and Intel. Apple being the chip designer wants a piece of that lucrative pie so that's why it's a very enclosed system.

 

[ByeByeJohnny]

And to take it one step further, the 1/15/2021 $500 call is bid at $16.55. Or you could be more aggressive with the strike price: the 12/11 $460 call is $11. Taking the first example, if you have 700 shares, you could write one call for $16.55, pocket $1,655 for two months, and the worst cast scenario is the stock jumps and 100 shares gets called from you at a price of $500. And you are still sitting on 600 shares valued at >$500 each. Very low risk way of generating some income.

I don't think there's anyway I could do this in my country. So I've never really looked into this. But assuming in this example you also have some cash couldn't you just buy another 100 shares as they get close to $500? Then you would still have the same number of shares and the $1,655? I assume there must be some catch? I guess there could be tax issues? What else?

I get that investing that cash in shares from the start would be better but then there's a risk (it could go down) and some seems to always like to have at least some cash on hand anyway.

 

[UCF3]

I don't think there's anyway I could do this in my country. So I've never really looked into this. But assuming in this example you also have some cash couldn't you just buy another 100 shares as they get close to $500? Then you would still have the same number of shares and the $1,655? I assume there must be some catch? I guess there could be tax issues? What else?.

You could but that would be a waste of capital if you leave $50,000 sitting around in cash. Might as well just buy those shares at $420 or whatever the price is when you sell the call. Also you run the risk of a squeeze happening and the price jumps above $500.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Pretty interesting discussion about the DOJO project.

• Key is the ability of the systems to querry the relevant/similiar data from the fleets enabling self supervision

Tesla can query the cars?! That’s very interesting. Are you sure?

Or does it simply ask the cars to send in all data from incidents matching certain criteria as of ‘now’. That would seem easier.

Querying the cars for data in real time would require that all ‘interesting’ data is saved and indexed in the car’s memory/storage. Sooner or later that storage becomes full, and old data must be overwritten. While this mobile database might be a good idea, it would blur the boundary between “my car works for me” and “my car works for Tesla”.

 

[Causalien]

These two tweets might be of interest: https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1326320974489378817 and https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1326321341096714243

"Near the end of last year Elon Musk decided that he was done trying to be nice to the journalists, Vanity Fair reports, seeing them as biased against him – parting ways with a PR firm and not filling communications positions when employees left."

[The tweet is referencing a vanity fair piece on Elon that I neither have nor will read]: "A person close to Musk told Vanity Fair: “Elon is his own communications director now.” When reached for comment on this characterization, Musk responded: “Vanity Fair sucks,” attributing the quote very clearly to himself."

Edit: The tweets are from a good cnbc journalist . Yes, I know what you're thinking! That's an oxymoron! But despite my disgust for cnbc, I really enjoy his writings. He mainly reports on spacestuff, and apparently that's just not interesting to the mothership.

Interesting take.

Cause Elon's recent Twitter and tesla's public announcements has been good lately. Which logically implies that all thise outburst and the 420 twit were planned by the PR department?

In any case, whatever is working now is good.

 

[willow_hiller]

Tesla can query the cars?! That’s very interesting. Are you sure?

Yep. They've been doing this since early 2019, at least. It was well documented in a series of tweets by Green where he was "debunking" the shadow mode myth. But it really showed the power of Tesla's fleet: https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1096322810694287361?s=20

Essentially Tesla can send out data collection "campaigns" to the fleet with certain parameters. They can tell the cars: If you drive within a certain longitude/latitude, snap a video. If you see something that looks like a stop sign, snap a video. If AP is disengaged by the user while it's raining, snap a video.

It's my understanding that this storage does fill up eventually, and it doesn't necessarily transfer back to the Mothership on LTE. It waits until the car is parked with WiFi before sending it all back to base.

 

[jhm]

Opening stocks: companies that will benefit as economy reopens from COVID
Closed stocks: companies that benefit from work at home

Thanks. Very helpful. Meanings were not at all what I expected.

 

[Boomer19]

I honestly thought the end of the election (especially with a Biden win) wouldn't be this boring. On that note, many of us are thinking about possible EV credits but I don't see much discussion about what might happen on the solar and battery side. If the Dems are serious about both climate and infrastructure, then a national push in those industries would make a lot of sense.


Is that why his office is based around his toilet? Sounds practical.

i questioned solar a few days ago as well.
no feedback yet.

say they push for solar and ev credits...and what are the chances of both, one, or none getting through...and if only 1, which one would be easier to slip through. guess it’s loaded question because we don’t know the terms. but just for conversation sake i thought it would be interesting to find out how much has already been budgeted/used by big gov for ev vs solar..and similar points.

 

[Boomer19]

Vanity Fair thinks they're standing up to a bully, but really they're just taking money to print a story. Not too dissimilar from the Business Insider model sadly.

This all started when Bethany McLean stood up for Linette Lopez whom she assumed was being bullied, but was really just being called out for Ctrl-V "journalism" on behalf of Jim Chanos. Last summer McLean then took the cash as printed a Chanos article of her own in Vanity Fair, having for years written some pretty amazing stuff including unearthing the Enron scandal.

As revenue recedes, traditional print has an easier time convincing themselves it's ok to take money for printing manufactured stories from 3rd parties with nefarious motives. Sad.

All that being said, I'm still giving VF and McLean a pass on their Elon hating. No one's perfect and relative to the rest they're great.

enron or not, bethany mclean is a paid chanos shill. just because they were on the side of good during one battle, doesn’t erase the misdeeds committed in all the other ones. she’s a co-conspirator in the illegal activity of short and distort