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

[Artful Dodger]

if volume at 30M is a relatively flat SP and the volume above that last week was someone's acquiring, how much was acquired last week? 40M-80M shares? (the volume over 30M each day)
IF that is true then the SP500 funds can buy in and only raise the SP another $80-$100 if they spread it out over the week.

Yeah, it's probably NOT true. On an average day, 90% of all volume is HFT, with 1 share bouncing back and forth among MMs millions of times. Data about the real, permanent transfer of shares is hidden from the Market, and especially from retail investors.

Even 45-day old Corporate 13F reports are 'redacted' now, provided the Berkshire Billion$ involved are large enough to influence the SEC.

It's deliberate deception, designed to defraud the maximum number of investors possible.

 

[MXWing]

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

As a reminder, @FrankSG theorized Softbank could be the "mystery" Q3 investor in TSLA.

We will know it’s Berkshire Hathaway if they advance to #3 market cap once Tesla hits #1.

That company that owns stakes in Tesla, Apple and has a Gecko for a mascot.

 

[SteveG3]

Ed is also the communications director for PAVE - Partners for Automated Vehicle Education. It's an organization devoted to stopping Tesla from developing vehicle autonomy. One of their reports attacking Tesla was cited in today's article. Every one of Tesla's competitors have signed on as members.

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education

Thanks for sharing this Mike, I'd not heard of PAVE before.

Their choice of communications director sure sounds consistent with your take on their mission (derailing Tesla's autonomous vehicle program). If you have a little time, please share some of what has most strongly led you to the conclusion that this is PAVE's real purpose. I poked around their website a little, but, I'm thinking you might be able to point me in the direction of some illuminating examples of this group's activity.

 

[CLK350]

Day traders are not gamblers.
Day traders are not investors.
Day traders do not have a get-rich-quick mentality.

The sum of stock price increases during a given period is much greater than increase in price during that period.

Day traders make a job (literally) out of trying to profit from the sum of increases instead of the long-term trend.
Day traders' need higher returns because they have to pay for their living expenses.

The weavers in traffic aren't the day traders. The weavers are impatient longs. The day traders are the people working irregular hours from home.

YES. They are Speculators without the pejorative tint usually associated with the term

It could be argued this is an art/ talent/ profession as "valid" as any other

Jesse Livermore's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is the quintessential Bible of the profession/ art

The more astute members of this board have done better than the HODL ers - nothing wrong with using two spoons rather than one, or spooning faster ;D

 

[Artful Dodger]

TW? TMW?

V'ger

Cheers!

 

[Artful Dodger]

I know many people are yelling manipulation today, but Tesla was green in a sea of EV/new energy apocalypse today.

Nio -10%
Xpeng -11%
Fisker -8%
Li -3%
Hyliion -5%
Kandi -12%(hit by short sellers today with fraud allegations of inflating numbers to attract investors)

Stay at home stocks were not getting much love today either, however I think some new money is coming in vs sector swinging as the drops I saw today wasn't very aggressive unlike a few weeks prior. But sucks if you own any ZM today.

But hey, at least ALKN is up biggly this week:

Cheers!

 

[Criscmt]

On Twitter @SawyerMerritt
BREAKING: SoftBank to wind down options trading after investor backlash - BBG
"Softbank is letting its options expire, instead of maintaining its positions. About 90% of the contracts will close out by the end of December because they are short-term. SoftBank has invested about $20 billion into tech stocks and derivatives through SB Northstar."

@All Thoughts?

@FrankSG Given your recent research on the missing shares and Softbank, I am curious about your thoughts on the potential impact of this (assuming true)

 

[Artful Dodger]

I wonder if GF Shanghai feels left out.

You're right: it's 5,000 nm to fly back to Los Angles (against the Polar Jetstream), but only 4500 nm to fly to Shanghai (downwind).

We need the wind at our back right now. Model Y 1st delivery ceremony?

Cheers!

 

[Criscmt]

Did S&P inadvertently or otherwise help MMs by their "consultation on 1 or 2 tranches but by Dec-21"?
People would speculate on 2 tranches given the uniqueness of TSLA and buy options across more weeks.
Does that at least partly explain the SP action today, options loose value, MMs dump some shares as less needed for delta hedging?

 

[ReddyLeaf]

Did S&P inadvertently or otherwise help MMs by their "consultation on 1 or 2 tranches but by Dec-21"?
People would speculate on 2 tranches given the uniqueness of TSLA and buy options across more weeks.
Does that at least partly explain the SP action today, options loose value, MMs dump some shares as less needed for delta hedging?

Yes, two tranches would mean that Dec 11 & 18 options would be worth something. Now they are crashing. Damn, I spread out a bunch of options for throughout the month and now the 12/24 ones are the only ones doing well. I guess we will see what tomorrow brings. Can we please have a stock split announcement?

 

[FrankSG]

On Twitter @SawyerMerritt
BREAKING: SoftBank to wind down options trading after investor backlash - BBG
"Softbank is letting its options expire, instead of maintaining its positions. About 90% of the contracts will close out by the end of December because they are short-term. SoftBank has invested about $20 billion into tech stocks and derivatives through SB Northstar."

@All Thoughts?

@FrankSG Given your recent research on the missing shares and Softbank, I am curious about your thoughts on the potential impact of this (assuming true)

Apparently their options positions are a "rounding error" compared to the long equity positions, so presumably it wouldn't change all that much then.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Doesn’t rhyme. Not poetry. Lifted directly, word-for-word, from some speech from the sixties.

Soliloquies and monologues appear to be well tolerated:

Dojo will see things you wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be etched in time, like lightning in the rain. Time to live.

Cheers!

 

[S3XY]

I know Alex and he has some criticisms of Tesla's approach to both Autopilot and Autonomy.

Niedermeier is a flack for Waymo and a bunch of "autonomy" companies that are 5-10 years behind Tesla. I met and talked to him at a party in January 2018 CES a few days after taking delivery of my first Model 3.

1. He claimed Toyota would always make better cars because they started making sewing machines and they understood attention to detail.

2. He claimed Tesla would not be able to ramp production to become a large automaker, thus being relegated to niche status, in perpetuity.

3. He refused to take 2 minutes as we walked out of the garage to take a look at my Model 3, after claiming repeatedly that since it was a Tesla it must be flawed in some fundamental way.

His entire life for the past many years has been based on sucking off Tesla's teet, propounding astounding varieties of FUD and then failing upward to run a professional disinformation campaign to throw sand into Tesla Network's launch.

As a funny aside, I attended the Cybertruck event in Hawthorne and afterwards went to the Los Angeles Ale Works and saw him hawking his book to SpaceX and Tesla employees . . . needless to say, it didn't go well.

Apparently he doesn't know that one of Elon's other companies makes rockets. No attention to detail required there.

 

[mrdoubleb]

Posting this for general entertainment purposes to lighten the mood while everyone is so tense about where the SP will go in the next few weeks:

BMW declared most sustainable car maker in the world by Dow Jones

 

[Dreadnought]

Posting this for general entertainment purposes to lighten the mood while everyone is so tense about where the SP will go in the next few weeks:

BMW declared most sustainable car maker in the world by Dow Jones

We all on this board know that this is not true as NKLA is the most sustainable car maker. But credit where it's due, BMW is catching up fast. I expect that in 5 years, they'll sell as many cars as NKLA today.

 

[saniflash]

Edit: if you don't currently have an actual margin call, just buy something else safe.

or buy some shitputs if you get a margin call

 

[Tslynk67]

Not sure if it has been posted, but here is the panel discussion of Axel Springer Award:

Did @Curt Renz call in sick, or something, you filling in for him?

 

[JBRR]

Things are getting toasty.

E*TRADE just increased margin maintenance requirement on Tesla from 40% to 70%. Looks like overleveraged retail will be getting margin called out of their shares.

Looks like 75% on IB as well. That's the margin freed up if I were to close the position.
For those looking to buffer their margin requirements a bit, buying OTM puts usually helps a bunch.

 

[Papafox]

My position is that while it is possible that manipulation happens sometimes, it is unlikely to happen regularly or recognizably because there are too many players in the market whose interests don't align. They are not friendly (actually, they're sharks, or maybe velociraptors) and would make far more money screwing each other than screwing retail investors. We have essentially no information at all on the short term "max pain" of individual players, so we have no way to know what they want. Aggregate knowledge tells us little or nothing.

If manipulation were recognizable, then predators would take advantage and nullify it, so it isn't. But the human brain is a pattern recognition machine, so even in the absence of patterns we imagine we see them. Ergo, all of TA. It's all garbage. You know this because it only works on the past, not the future (at least not at a rate greater than chance). And, amazingly (not), it turns out that when the stock price goes the way an individual likes then there's almost never a complaint of "manipulation", but when it doesn't....

All studies of the market have shown that short-term movements are unpredictable. When they are predictable, traders swoop in to take advantage and they become unpredictable again.

So, no, I don't believe there's much manipulation, I don't believe that it's always in one direction, and I don't believe that it's actionable even if present. And I believe that people who sagely explain why any stock did what it did that day (or any time in the past) are pretty much making it up. People who can successfully explain (read: predict) the future, on the other hand, are golden.

But, really, who cares what I think? I'm no expert. I can't predict the future and I can't explain the past, not with any consistency. I think the difference between us is that you think you can. You might want to test that belief, just in the interest of self-knowledge.

Thanks for the reply. What we share in common is a belief that no common methods of guessing short term movements of stock prices are terrific for predicting short term price movements. News or macros can cause price movements that are totally unexpected and overrule the expected movements. Even fundamentals can be of dubious help in short term predictions, as we've seen with truly unexpected price movements after an earnings report.

That said, tools such as technical analysis and spotting repeating patterns of apparent manipulation can aid an investor's profitability. What really caught my attention about technical analysis was how @Curt Renz would talk about a Fibonacci retracement level when we were experiencing one of those hellacious mega-dips in previous years, and lo and behold the bottom of the dip turned out to be precisely the number Curt put forward. He did this multiple times. The ability of the stock to bounce off upper and lower bollinger bands is so common that attributing such behavior to chance is ludicrous. I really don't know if technical analysis is such a precise distillation of human psychology or if it works simply because there are people controlling large amounts of money who THINK it works (and it therefore affects their buying and selling behavior) but the result is that technical analysis sometimes does have predictive powers.

As for manipulations, we very often see the stock price take a big dip in the second half of the week and close very near the price where call options dominate going up and put options dominate going down. I've listened to explanations why this might be a natural phenomenon rather than a manipulation, but whatever the cause the result is the same: a sale price for Tesla shares and options at the end of the week and a good chance you will see a higher price come Monday.

You see, here's the thing. You haven't personally benefitted from TA or placed bets on perceived manipulation patterns, but that doesn't mean that other people aren't benefitting from these tools. Over the past 18 months I'm up over 20X with my TSLA investments and I couldn't have done that with pure HODL investing in stock. You suggest I should test my beliefs, but that is exactly what I do with my investment decisions on a regular basis. Live and let live, my friend, we'll both do well with TSLA.

 

[chrsk]

572$...