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

[Artful Dodger]

Starting at $74,739??

It's the tariffs:

How do import tariffs on cars affect competitiveness? The case of India and Pakistan

Tesla would have to do at least local assembly to avoid them. I look for the first auto plant in India to be for the Model 1 / Robotaxi @ the $15K price point (avg car price in India is $10k).

 

[elasalle]

Converted +45 Jun22 Vertical Call Spreads with upper/short legs in $700 strikes to shares today. So ya I did buy Shares at $674 today
Sold July 21 CC against the new .. so I could bundle the shares to another 100 round figure .. (though IV is a bit low)
~ Cheers

 

[Paracelsus]

Now that sp 500 dust has settled, I still have a basic question.

That closing at 695...

Where did all those shares come from?

This morning’s price action combined with the escalation of ridiculous FUD over the weekend might make one wonder if the market is still trying to sort that out too, while using all the ‘Tools’ they have at their disposal like Anton in hopes of keeping a lid on the price until they do get it figured out ............... It seems a little more volitile than simply all the good little boys and girls pouring their Christmas stocking cash into their Robinhood TSLA accounts

 

[Unpilot]

MMD in da house.

 

[DutchDriver]

MMD back from Christmas dinner

 

[BlackS]

Record Electric Vehicle Sales in China

Record Electric Vehicle Sales in China
While the overall Chinese auto market is slowly picking up (+12% year over year in November), plugin vehicles are already on the fast lane, growing by 138% year over year (YoY) to a record 198,000 units.

This time, plugin hybrids (PHEVs) grew faster than full electrics (BEVs) — +164% versus +134%. Despite this uptick from plugin hybrids, however, BEVs still own 80% of the plugin vehicle (PEV) market.

Model 3 is number 2 on the list.

#2? Must be a demand problem....

 

[Lycanthrope]

It's the tariffs:

How do import tariffs on cars affect competitiveness? The case of India and Pakistan

Tesla would have to do at least local assembly to avoid them. I look for the first auto plant in India to be for the Model 1 / Robotaxi @ the $15K price point (avg car price in India is $10k).

Yeah, has to be something going on to circumvent those tariffs - unless Tesla cut a deal with the Indian government...

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

Did we ever uncover what Berkshire Hathaway was 'hiding' in their portfolio that wasnt reported? I think I assumed it was TSLA before the inclusion but I never saw it further discussed here. My uneducated (and probably wrong) guess is that they were buying up tons of TSLA stock as soon as it was announced in a small trickle over the 30+ days and then dumped it to make them available that Friday at 3:40pm to help keep from an infinite squeeze from happening. They actually smoothed out the spike that would have happened and therefor also the following dip from people selling off the following Monday.

Also, why isn't the Tesla in India in 2021 a big deal? Seems like huge news to me: "The electric-car maker will start with sales and then might look at assembly and manufacturing based on the response, the minister told here the newspaper."

Spoiler: OT: Ford Commercial

I saw 2 Ford EV commercials when watching football this weekend. One was a generic one saying they weren't going to be left in the dust and they embrace change (ha ha ha) and the other was a spoof of Christmas Vacation scene where Clark is trying to light up the house but then they see a Mach-E and they all go over and gather towards it. Seems like a great metaphor for everyone leaving Clark Griswold's failed attempt at electric ability (ICE OEMs) and goes over to the new hot electric car (Tesla)

 

[BlackS]

What a garbage article on Market Watch this morning:

Is Tesla the next AOL? That’s what this strategist is warning

Laughable! You can instantly tell how completely incompetent these so called strategists are the minute they are starting to compare Tesla to a (failed) company of the past.

Also, of course the article closing by stating their wishful thinking:

Tesla shares were drifting lower ahead of Monday’s opening bell, while futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average YM00, 0.55%, tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite NQ00, 0.92% and S&P 500 ES00, 0.75% were all pointing to a positive start to the week.

Yeah....this dumbs**t probably watched some Gordo videos and thought to himself "hmm...Gordo actually makes sense in comparing AOL and tulips, Tilray and Sun Edison to Tesla....I will roll with that". You can find clowns on every corner these days.

 

[jw934]

Yes, I track this every day.

I found that reply both informative and amazing. Not only do you track and record the max pain number every day, but you also actually look at them (as indicated by the different timestamps of the day). With the daily published summaries (morning and night), which I deeply appreciate, your trading is based on perhaps 10,000X to 1e5X more data points than my trading.

Do you have a logger that automatically track every market number that comes to your PC?

 

[jbcarioca]

...
Also, why isn't the Tesla in India in 2021 a big deal? Seems like huge news to me: "The electric-car maker will start with sales and then might look at assembly and manufacturing based on the response, the minister told here the newspaper."

Even with local assembly Model 3 is too late to be a major factor in India. For major success the product needs to be smaller than anything currently popular in North America.
For urban markets in almost every country other than North America, Australia/NZ and Scandinavia the largest sales are much smaller. Almost certainly the Designed in China vehicle will be a 'world car' that will end out in production/assembly in many large markets. Think China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, the rest of Mercosur, the EU, Japan, Taiwan...
That next generation will be the Designed in China Designed in Germany vehicles that will go where Tesla has never been before. Probably those will not be sold in NA, possibly the German ones might be. What will happen is that new GF's and Tilburg-style plants will be quite widely spread in order to meet local content/assembly rules.

To begin with some MIC Model 3's will certainly go to India but, frankly, Tesla Energy and charging infrastructure innovations will probably be the giant innovations from Tesla. Think power plant capability, grid services and similar things.

India is indeed huge. Just don't forget that the central government cannot overcome States and bureaucracy seems to have been invented there. There are reasons why many of the most successful Indian business people, scientists, Medical Doctors etc have made their marks outside India.

Tesla is making a strategic position because of the determination to "Go Green";
https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/green-initiative-268079-
2015-10-14
Making a policy goal is not the same as achieving the goal, perhaps more so in India than in many other countries.
Anybody who's spent a few years in The Gulf knows how much talent there is in India. Pepsi, Microsoft, Citigroup, and a huge proportion of US Medical Doctors are all the diaspora. Many of them would not have left India were they able do succeed similarly there. Tesla has some of them too. Perhaps the Vice President elect of the US might explain her mother's trajectory.
Eventually Tesla will make success in India. For now it is aspirational.

Some of my Indian colleagues have even invested much of their wealth in improving Indian higher education. Great! The supply of highly educated well prepared Indian diaspora is constantly increasing.

 

[Big Time]

Was today all time high open?

 

[Artful Dodger]

I found that reply both informative and amazing. Not only do you track and record the max pain number every day, but you also actually look at them (as indicated by the different timestamps of the day). With the daily published summaries (morning and night), which I deeply appreciate, your trading is based on perhaps 10,000X to 1e5X more data points than my trading.

Do you have a logger that automatically track every market number that comes to your PC?

It's basically chron jobs, but not worth automating any further IMO. Not enough need. The data tracked evolves over time, ie: on Dec 18 I added the daily S&P 500 weight for TSLA.

 

[Krugerrand]

Yeah, has to be something going on to circumvent those tariffs - unless Tesla cut a deal with the Indian government...

Exactly. There’s away around it that’s already been thought of or arranged.

 

[dakh]

MMD in da house.

How can one not trade that? Such easy money...

 

[StealthP3D]

Think logically, please. AAPL knows how to build chips that are spectacular advances over anything generic. TSLA has done the same. In both cases the 'secret sauce' is designing for a specific purpose.

It's true that designing to a specific purpose is key to making better products. But you have to know to what purpose you are designing. Often, the answer is not clear. Take FSD, for example. You can't design the chip until you know how to solve the FSD problem.
If Apple is such a chip powerhouse, then why does every 5g iPhone become inoperable without the Qualcomm chips they use to connect to the network? In 2019 AAPL even bought the cellphone chipset division of Intel, specifically to bring the RF front end in-house. They even got 2,200 Intel employees who had expertise in RF front-ends.

Apple intended to build their own 5G RF front-ends but they have struggled mightily and finally broke down last year and signed a supply agreement with Qualcomm for the necessary RF chips. This digital radio front end is the most difficult part of the phone and is what separates the experts from the pretenders. Without a well-designed RF front end the phone could drop calls or have inferior wireless data speeds. And what is a smartphone if not a reliable and fast wireless connection to the network? A CPU is easy by comparison.

There are a lot of things money can't buy and Apple still doesn't have the baseband processor expertise to make their own wireless modems for 5G. Apple's dirty little secret is they get their expertise in just about every area they appear to have some by copying or buying the work of others. That's why they are never on the bleeding edge. They basically admit as much when they say they wait until a technology or new feature is "mature" enough to bring to market. This means in a couple of years they will have succeeded in bringing their "own" 5G RF chipset to market. It takes time to copy such esoteric, high-tech stuff!

What does this have to do with TSLA or Tesla? It's just a round about way of saying that Apple is no threat to Tesla. By the time Apple manages to copy what Tesla has achieved, Tesla will be releasing the next generation technologies. This is why Tesla is not worried about others copying their IPR - they move too fast for it to matter. And that's why Apple is still at least 1-2 years away from having their own 5G RF front-end.

Apple can do automotive infotainment systems for other manufacturers and they will probably be very good. Tesla will always do their own infotainment software. FSD requires a whole different level of innovation and this is not where Apple's expertise lies.

 

[Big Time]

It's true that designing to a specific purpose is key to making better products. But you have to know to what purpose you are designing. Often, the answer is not clear. Take FSD, for example. You can't design the chip until you know how to solve the FSD problem.
If Apple is such a chip powerhouse, then why does every 5g iPhone become inoperable without the Qualcomm chips they use to connect to the network? In 2019 AAPL even bought the cellphone chipset division of Intel, specifically to bring the RF front end in-house. They even got 2,200 Intel employees who had expertise in FR front-ends.

Apple intended to build their own 5G RF front-ends but they have struggled mightily and finally broke down last year and signed a supply agreement with Qualcomm for the necessary RF chips. This digital radio front end is the most difficult part of the phone and is what separates the experts from the pretenders. Without a well-designed RF front end the phone could drop calls or have inferior wireless data speeds. And what is a smartphone if not a reliable and fast wireless connection to the network? A CPU is easy by comparison.

There are a lot of things money can't buy and Apple still doesn't have the baseband processor expertise to make their own wireless modems for 5G. Apple's dirty little secret is they get their expertise in just about every area they appear to have some by copying or buying the work of others. That's why they are never on the bleeding edge. They basically admit as much when they say they wait until a technology or new feature is "mature" enough to bring to market. This means in a couple of years they will have succeeded in bringing their "own" 5G RF chipset to market. It takes time to copy such esoteric, high-tech stuff!

What does this have to do with TSLA or Tesla? It's just a round about way of saying that Apple is no threat to Tesla. By the time Apple manages to copy what Tesla has achieved, Tesla will be releasing the next generation technologies. This is why Tesla is not worried about others copying their IPR - they move too fast for it to matter. And that's why Apple is still at least 1-2 years away from having their own 5G RF front-end.

Apple can do automotive infotainment systems for other manufacturers and they will probably be very good. Tesla will always do their own. FSD requires a whole different level of innovation and this is not where Apple's expertise lies.

This may have to do with IP too, Apple may have tried to design something without using Qualcomm’s IP and couldn’t compete performance wise or at least couldn’t compete in the timeline they had. This same thing probably goes for Tesla too. No doubt ICE manufacturers tear it down but realize they can’t achieve it without infringing on copywrite law.

 

[BrownOuttaSpec]

Even with local assembly Model 3 is too late to be a major factor in India. For major success the product needs to be smaller than anything currently popular in North America....

Thank you for all the insightful information and I do agree that the "Tesla Energy and charging infrastructure innovations will probably be the giant innovations from Tesla.". Could the Model 3 in India be the equivalent to the Model S in the US? Tesla uses the Model 3 as a Luxary car in India that is too big and expensive but get everyone talking about it and then come in later with a MiC or MiI (made in India) model 2 that is much cheaper and more widely adopted that more people could get use out of? Either way, it seems that now having a footprint in the 2 most populous countries in the world can't be considered anything but great news!

 

[Curt Renz]

Zacks now rates TSLA a Strong Buy.

Zacks - today: https://www.zacks.com/stock/quote/TSLA?q=tsla

 

[StealthP3D]

This may have to do with IP too, Apple may have tried to design something without using Qualcomm’s IP and couldn’t compete performance wise or at least couldn’t compete in the timeline they had. This same thing probably goes for Tesla too. No doubt ICE manufacturers tear it down but realize they can’t achieve it without infringing on copywrite law.

Nope. Qualcomm doesn't charge a bloody cent for other chipmakers to use their IPR - it's free to the chipmakers. They license ONLY at the handset level. Apple still needs a separate license even though they buy Qualcomm chipsets. This is the same license they would need if they made their own chips or bought from a different supplier. And, contrary to what you may have heard, the license is cheap, the bargain of the century, considering iPhones would be worthless without a robust and reliable wireless data connection.