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

[tinyrodent]

I enjoyed watching this short (~1 min) video from Wuwa several times. It's a time lapse showing the impressively coordinated movement of new Model 3 vehicles around the Shanghai factory site.

On the west side, new bridge construction nears completion, and it appears Tesla has taken over a parking lot for additional storage of transport trailers. There used to be more parking and temporary housing in this area, perhaps that was no longer needed with major construction activities on the site winding down.

Also noticed behind the stamping addition, hundreds more piles ready to be driven. They are running out of places to build stuff here...

 

[H Mak]

I'm planning selling a large part of my shares - long due reorganization of our holdings that I always deferred because it seemed like it was never a good time to sell tsla.
I do not have a real plan with price points, very interested in learning about your approach.
I was thinking to link my selling to certain dates (e.g. dec 14, dec 20-21) rather than price points.

Over the last 6 months I have been doing the opposite whenever the price was in a declining trend, i.e. buy a set number at each lower price point. Which is why I have ended up with more shares than my initial target core holding.

 

[lafrisbee]

11001 pages is NOT a milestone.
But DAMN!

 

[UkNorthampton]

@StealthP3D has talked at length about why *we* don’t do this - main point being, you will kick yourself if it doesn’t come back down and just keeps rising, and/or you don’t time the buy back correctly like the dozens and dozens of people in this thread who’ve missed the buy back.

If you need the money soon, knock yourself out. If you don’t, play dead.

I'll play dead until I need some money. After retirement/when necessary, I'll sell as few shares as possible. I expect TSLA / total worth of holdings to go up faster than I reduce my shares. By my guess/calcs, I'll never run out of shares, but I'll keep it under review. Might be wrong. Relatively low risk (except bulk in one company /12+ startups) and money is invested in TSLA (with mission & hopefully excellent growth) for as long as possible.

Taking a large sum of money out of TSLA and putting into an annuity, property or income fund isn't for me.

 

[juanmedina]

Some weekend OT this guys are making battery packs for lots of OEMs and I really like Mate. I would love to own some Rimac. He talks about the OEMs that he is working with at the 19 min mark:

A little more OT. In this video Mate talks about 2-speed transmissions and how the release of the Tesla Roadster made him go back to the drawing board for the powertrain of his Hypercar at the 26:20 mark:

 

[UncaNed]

The advantage of rolling in a loosing position is that it can be done with 0 associated cost at the time of event. Say you have 0$ left in account, and a CC expiring this Fri at 3K loss. To close it you would need 3K, but you have 0$ in account. Not possible right? No, by selling a 3Mth out CC and closing the current at the same time, the newly sold position enables you to have the $$ to close the current 3K loss.

There is always a sell and buy dual trade in a roll.
If current loss is accounted as a loss, that is even better for current year Taxes.

As with other options, basically you are trading time for value. If you are selling CC's against stocks, you could technically keep going for ever. However if they are against LEAPS, other options then the game is up when the underlying is set to expire.

Thanks for your patience, @elasalle and @Right_Said_Fred . I'm just doing LEAPS, so I guess that's why I didn't see the advantage in rolling in one transaction.

 

[UncaNed]

Don't forget that there will continue to be other road users, including cyclists, pedestrians, scooter riders, etc. And then there are the "unexpected" road crossers including deer, squirrels, bobcats, housecats, etc.

FSD could recognize these road crossers and broadcast various species-specific warning sounds to scare wildlife away from the road, learning with time to optimize for the most effective scare-away sounds.

 

[Featsbeyond50]

One side effect of this is that cities will need to come up with a way to replace all the lost revenue from traffic citations and parking tickets.

Well that sucks. I kind of like the idea of idiots subsidizing my taxes. What's next, are you going to tell me there's a future when alcohol and tobacco are no longer taxed?

 

[Sudre]

Some weekend OT this guys are making battery packs for lots of OEMs and I really like Mate. I would love to own some Rimac. He talks about the OEMs that he is working with at the 19 min mark:

Putting this on topic. Note how he talks about all the German car makers he is designing packs for. now.... If you are a car buyer and you could buy your mass produced car made by the guy who designed it OR you could buy your mass produced car from someone just buying the parts from someone else, which would your prefer?

I know I would feel I was getting a much better product buying it from the genius than from..... say.... VW who is just throwing assorted parts together from different OEMs even if the drive train came from the genius. That means I am either buying a $40K to $200K Tesla or a Million dollar Rimac supercar.

If the current automakers are just having someone else design this stuff then what makes them worth investing in? What is their moat? Better at assembling Legos? LOL

 

[OrthoSurg]

Marketing, advertisement or the art of deception and lies

 

[PeterJA]

Depends on the decouple. If Tesla hits over 1k due to Volkswagen like squeeze then yes do expect it to drop down. Tesla will be a 2 trillion dollar company one day, just not by the end of this year lol.

A share price of $1k will give Tesla a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, not 2. Is that decoupled from reality "by the end of this year"? The market is forward looking. What will they see by the end of this year?

1) Three new factories each producing 1-2 million vehicles within a few years, if they can get enough battery cells.
2) Megapack batteries sold out for years, if they can get enough cells.
3) A plan to get the cells, for half the current cost.
4) Cybertruck coming within one year, with demand "unlike anything we've seen before," according to Elon.
5) Tesla Semi coming within one year, with demand so high that Nikola and others are trying to cash in.
6) Tesla Solar sales exploding due to unbeatable pricing.
7) Tesla Energy expanding into electricity sales in the UK, the first step to worldwide conquest.
8) Tesla Insurance expanding soon beyond California.
9) FSD beta expanding to more testers, with "entire new areas of functionality," according to Elon.
10)15-30% of TSLA float disappearing from the market permanently into S&P index and benchmark funds.

I'm not selling anything for a piddly $600... or $800... or $1k. If the share price hits $2k in December, I might sell a few shares that I bought after hours when S&P announced. Maybe. But let's see how wild the FSD wild card is next week.

Tesla's FSD Beta will be updated next week, wider test group to be considered

 

[Words of HABIT]

How Cathie Wood Beat Wall Street By Betting Tesla Is Worth More Than $1 Trillion

A lot of talk on Kathie Wood and ARK Investments on this thread. I do not recall this article having been posted before, it is a fresh read (Forbes article posted October 5th, 2020) on Kathie Wood and her career development.

"An optimist by nature, Wood nonetheless offers some unsettling predictions for the next five years. She expects a broad swath of large industries—banking, energy, transportation, health care—to be disrupted by technological change, with many workers displaced. The result, she believes, is that economic growth, inflation and broad market indexes will all fall persistently short of expectations, providing an opportunity for active managers to pick the innovative winners that will continue to drive market-cap gains."

I read the above as Tesla being one of the disruptors, in not the main disruptor.

"Does she think the market is now in a bubble? Nope. Uncertainty over the pandemic and the election (Wood supports President Trump “unabashedly”) means money has been flowing out of stocks and into the safety of bonds, she notes. “The fact that people are fearful now that we’re back at the S&P 500 trading at 25 times earnings tells me that we are not in a bubble at all.”

Expect more gains to come for disruptors.

 

[wipster]

The greatest challenge in IT is to get two independently developed computing systems to communicate precisely, unambiguously, and accurately their most intimate thoughts with each other

Like the Machine and Samaritan?

 

[Curt Renz]

What's Inside? Family - today:

 

[ABCTG]

https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1330553052957347841

 

[WattsHappening]

@StealthP3D has talked at length about why *we* don’t do this - main point being, you will kick yourself if it doesn’t come back down and just keeps rising, and/or you don’t time the buy back correctly like the dozens and dozens of people in this thread who’ve missed the buy back.

If you need the money soon, knock yourself out. If you don’t, play dead.

If you say so. Be sure. Because I’ve heard that line many times here only for the people to post their regret, frustration and self-proclaimed stupidity.

Of course everyone has their own individual needs and should act accordingly.

But I agree with this. Timing sales and purchases based on price is SO hard. Sell at $600 to get back in when? $500? $450? Then what happens if the stock keeps going up? It will be very hard psychologically to buy at anything higher than $600. So unless you time things perfectly or close to, you run the very real risk of mis-timing and missing out.

A member of my family sold a significant portion of her portfolio back in March when the COVID news hit the market hard. I tried to convince her to stay the course. But she was very confident that COVID was going to take down the world economy and we were headed for a long bear market. She sold on the way down, which would have been a good trade IF she got back in near the bottom. Instead, the market snapped back way earlier and quicker than she expected. And as I argued while she was selling, she has not been able to get over the psychological hurdle of paying a higher price than she sold for. She's still out of the market and kicking herself for it. I bet many of us here can share a similar story.

I'm a big believer in Motley Fool's data driven strategy: find good companies with huge market opportunity and visionary leaders and make regular investments into these companies and stay in for a long period of time. They are big believers that winners keep winning, so don't hesitate to buy even if the stock price seems hard to justify. I think Tesla fits these qualifiers perfectly.

MF also strongly recommends being well diversified to lower risk. That is one MF strategy that I am not following.

 

[StealthP3D]

@StealthP3D has talked at length about why *we* don’t do this - main point being, you will kick yourself if it doesn’t come back down and just keeps rising, and/or you don’t time the buy back correctly like the dozens and dozens of people in this thread who’ve missed the buy back.

If you need the money soon, knock yourself out. If you don’t, play dead.

Right, when you write a covered call far out of the money you are accepting a high chance of a small payment in return for giving up (presumably) a smaller chance of a potentially huge payment.

The second half of last year a number of us were gobbling up a bunch of TSLA calls for under a buck (around $90/contract). They ended up being worth $10,000-$30,000 (and more) per contract. Every trade has has two sides (someone has to cover the other side of the trade). Do you know what you call the other side of these trades? Yep, writing a call. I was amazed anyone would sell them that cheaply. Maybe in the future they will think twice about picking up pennies in front of the steam-roller that is called Tesla!

I'm not saying never write a covered call (there can be a time and a place for everything) but a little part of me dies every time someone refers to them as "free money". This thinking that writing calls is like "free money" is due to a built-in human tendency for the brain to discount the chance of an unpleasant thing happening beyond the actual odds of it occurring (sometimes to the point of ignoring that it is even possible). As in, "I'll write this covered TSLA call and collect the premium because, what are the chances TSLA could go to (insert what sounds like a high price here)? That's a ridiculous price it will never hit." And since most of these trades result in a small payout, the behavior is reinforced time and time again. This makes it seem like "free money". But don't fool yourself. This human tendency has been studied and documented in actual scientific studies.

This behavior has a counterpart - humans perceive the chances of a positive event happening as higher than it actually is. That is why so many people buy lottery tickets even though it's like throwing away $0.50 of every dollar. These are about the same odds as one of the worst payouts in Vegas - they don't call them "one-armed bandits" without a good reason.

On the other hand, I would like some more of those cheap Tesla calls. And guess what makes them cheap? That's right, it's supply and demand. The more people willing to write calls on the cheap, the cheaper they become. That's why so many of us longs made a killing on calls last year. Because TSLAQ was under the delusion that writing calls was like free money and they were grabbing all they could get. And as the premium on those calls rose, TSLAQ thought they looked even more tempting to write. So go ahead and pick up those pennies in front of the steamroller as it benefits TSLA bulls! When you write a TSLA covered call you are essentially saying you are more bearish on TSLA than the other market participants.

 

[S3XY]

Tesla Owners Only dating site, you say?

Tag line: "It's electric!"

 

[WattsHappening]

I'm not saying never write a covered call (there can be a time and a place for everything) but a little part of me dies every time someone refers to them as "free money". This thinking that writing calls is like "free money" is due to a built-in human tendency for the brain to discount the chance of an unpleasant thing happening beyond the actual odds of it occurring (sometimes to the point of ignoring that it is even possible). As in, "I'll write this covered TSLA call and collect the premium because, what are the chances TSLA could go to (insert what sounds like a high price here)? That's a ridiculous price it will never hit." And since most of these trades result in a small payout, the behavior is reinforced time and time again. This makes it seem like "free money". But don't fool yourself. This human tendency has been studied and documented in actual scientific studies.

Excellent point.

I admit to being one who referred to CCs as 'free money'. You are right; it's not free money as you expertly explained. It's a strategy that has a place and time like all other strategies. The one big advantage it offers is time. Just like time is on your side when you invest for the long haul and let gains grow over time, CCs offer the writer the advantage of earning the time value of options.

 

[Singuy]

A share price of $1k will give Tesla a market cap of 1 trillion dollars, not 2. Is that decoupled from reality "by the end of this year"? The market is forward looking. What will they see by the end of this year?

1) Three new factories each producing 1-2 million vehicles within a few years, if they can get enough battery cells.
2) Megapack batteries sold out for years, if they can get enough cells.
3) A plan to get the cells, for half the current cost.
4) Cybertruck coming within one year, with demand "unlike anything we've seen before," according to Elon.
5) Tesla Semi coming within one year, with demand so high that Nikola and others are trying to cash in.
6) Tesla Solar sales exploding due to unbeatable pricing.
7) Tesla Energy expanding into electricity sales in the UK, the first step to worldwide conquest.
8) Tesla Insurance expanding soon beyond California.
9) FSD beta expanding to more testers, with "entire new areas of functionality," according to Elon.
10)15-30% of TSLA float disappearing from the market permanently into S&P index and benchmark funds.

I'm not selling anything for a piddly $600... or $800... or $1k. If the share price hits $2k in December, I might sell a few shares that I bought after hours when S&P announced. Maybe. But let's see how wild the FSD wild card is next week.

Tesla's FSD Beta will be updated next week, wider test group to be considered

I said 1k plus. Let's just say If there's a squeeze to 1k, we can probably see 2k shortly. I mentioned Volkswagen, which was a 5x movement, which puts Tesla at 2 trillion. And you bet I'll be putting in sell orders starting at 1k all the way up. Don't really need you to list how awesome Tesla is. Tesla is worth around 400-500 today, maybe 500+ after q4 report but that's about it. I know this because the market have spoken and Tesla have been hovering around 400 despite battery day or good q3. So if a 5x squeeze happens, no matter how you spin Tesla it's not worth the price. Not worth 1 trillion by year end either cause wtf. Tesla isn't Nikola or nio, you need execution to go along with the valuation, not hope and wishes. But hey hopes and wishes can carry the stock some distance but eventually it falls to fundamentals.