Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

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

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
I really apologize for quoting my own post... that just seems amazingly tacky. But I just thought I'd gently dip a toe in these waters, and maybe add a few thoughts to the quoted post. Hopefully, the sharks won't rip that toe off and go for the leg. ;)

I just wanted to jump a bit deeper into the whole buy-and-hold philosophy, at least from my point of view. The first step in buy-and-hold is finding a company that is worth your investment dollars.

So what makes for a good growth stock? Tesla is a perfect case study. A person comes up with a fantastic, paradigm shifting product, and starts a company. The product is good, well received, and has the potential to be an actual paradigm shifting product, such that the market finds itself in a "reset to zero" position.

What's a "reset to zero?" Imagine it's the industrial revolution. You have a horse drawn carriage business. You make the absolute best carriages in the business. People can't buy them fast enough. You're making a fortune. Then someone comes along and invents the automobile. How is your carriage business going to survive? In its current form, it isn't. You've found yourself in a paradigm "reset to zero" shift.

The BEV is going to do to the ICE engine what the automobile did to the horse drawn carriage. Finding a company that recognizes this, takes advantage of it, and manages to execute the design and production of the new product is going to be a force to be reckoned with. If the current automobile manufacturers (also known as the horse drawn carriage makers of today) don't adapt, they won't survive. Adequately covering just this subject alone would require at least a hundred pages of text, so that's as far as we're gonna peek down that rabbit hole for now.

Please forgive the pun, but it's time to shift gears. Now that we've identified the company that has our interest, let's talk a bit about why the market analysts (both the bulls and the bears) shouldn't be listened to. You'll find just as many professional analysts that say you should short the stock as there are that say you should buy it. Well, maybe not 50/50, but the point is still made. The ONLY ANALYSIS THAT MATTERS IS YOUR OWN. YOU are perfectly capable of doing your own research and making your own decisions. Research the company. Investigate the management. Analyze how they plan on executing their business plan. Critique the product. Ask questions: Do people love the product? Is the product well made? Are they able to make a decent margin on the product? Are there additional revenue streams that they are taking advantage of? Do their quarterly reports show that they are spending money in the appropriate areas, while keeping costs in line? What are their plans for the future? How are they managing problems that come up (an example of this would be charging infrastructure)? Are the plans that they have made for growing the company reasonable? What competition will they face? How could this affect them? What makes this product a paradigm shifter? This whole process is called fundamental stock analysis. And the most qualified person to decide where your money goes is you; all of this information is publicly available, and YOU will care a lot more about how your dollars are invested than some analyst. Take your time. Learn. Ask questions. Mull it over. Give it some brain time. Make a company EARN your investment dollars through your research before you ever buy even a single share. This is what I did with Tesla. I even bought the product itself. For me, buying the product answered the last of my research questions, and convinced me to buy the stock.

Professional stock analysts often "analyze" thousands of different companies in a year. Do they really have the time to put in the research that they should before they offer their "professional" advice on said stock? No.... no they don't. A perfect example of this is the analysts that pigeon hole Tesla into the automotive sector. I don't have enough hands to facepalm adequately at these guys. That's like putting automobile manufacturers in the horse drawn carriage manufacturer's class. Another example is how so many "professional" stock analysts say that Tesla's current P/E BY ITSELF makes it tremendously over-valued. Have these guys never analyzed a growth company before?

If you are going to listen to the "professional" analysts, you owe it to yourself to analyze the analyst. Does what they say make sense? Are they assigning numbers that are appropriate to the company? Are they comparing the company to competitors in a way that has some sense of logic to it? If you find yourself saying "no" to these questions, you've probably found an analyst that you should completely ignore. The TL;DR of this: Don't go blindly listening to "professional" analysts. Scrutinize what they say in the same way you would the company you're considering investing in. Yes, it is possible to find analysts that are worth listening to. It's fine to listen to a guy that makes sense. The whole point is that you should critique analysts just as highly as you critique a company you're thinking of investing in.

And as a closing thought to this wall of text...Don't go blindly taking investment advice off the internet. Run everything you read through your own logic checker located between your ears. :)

Just a bit of quick background on where this is coming from. I've been a long term buy-and-hold investor since 1985. And yes, I realize there are other valid strategies for investing in the stock market.... this just happens to be mine. ;)

I could continue with my take on buy-and-hold, but I figure I'd just throw this up and see how hard the sharks bite, and also to see if anyone even finds it of value before I continue. So please feel free to disagree/like, etc. But for now, I'm gonna go wash my car. :D

I gave you a like for the following reasons;

You said buy and hold right off (and that’s as far as I read — seemed too daunting to go further, but that’s just the kind of a day I’m having).

You appeared to have used proper sentence and paragraph structure with lots of punctuation.

You didn’t mention owning a dog that I saw on quick scanning of your soliloquy.
 
They should revise the price of the Semi. The margins looks pretty low as you also need to spread the mega charger cost across them as well when all other models doesn't need such infrastructure.

I'm actually really ok with pricing and here's the reason why:

In the commercial transportation space, they're going to feel no pressure to reduce prices to expand the total addressable market in that space. They're already price to win that market. And businesses are not going to be fickle about seasonality or holding off purchases for future price cuts. It's a fundamentally different buyer where orders translate to sales in a very predictable way.

So as the 4680 cells ramp in later 2021 and 2022 through 2025 and the cost savings of the cells/packs are realized every year, I do not believe the Semi will see corresponding price cuts, like how the consumer vehicles do and thus margins will continually increase on the Semi over time in a very predictable way
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Queeg500
My brokerage platform's newsfeed - half hour ago:

upload_2021-1-28_13-50-12.png
 
Two good posts, although their lengths may diminish the number of readers.
It’s hard to discern how much time you spend here in the Investors’ swamp, given your paucity of contributions here, so here’s a little heads-up: with 2 or 3 exceptions, the heavy hitters here all are graduates of the Buy & Go Away school. To the extent they post here, it’s usually quips and anecdotes and {some attempt at} humor. One can try to proselytize the virtues of long term investing, try to warn of the perils of conflating clever trading skills with bull-market tide-rising, but n=0 is not a great conversion trend. LT investing also is not the most scintillating of conversations, either. “Today I did nothing” gets rather difficult to read after the first several thousand trading days.
Hint: read my avatar...
Point well taken. I really haven't read a lot here, that's for sure. But what I have read were several guys that, IMO, were "doing it wrong." They seemed to want to follow a buy-and-hold philosophy but were failing desperately in execution. They came here asking for help. The types of replies that they got seemed to be from guys that do follow buy-and-hold, but were more quick to reply with a witty quip than with help as to what they might be doing wrong. Hence the two walls of text I posted, to possibly help some guys that are trying to invest in a growth company with little to no education on the market and investing strategies. Like... at all. I'll be the first to admit that internet forums are not the best place to attempt to get an education on the finer points of the market (or even overall investment strategies), but it seems like for some of these guys, it's all they have.
I gave you a like for the following reasons;

You said buy and hold right off (and that’s as far as I read — seemed too daunting to go further, but that’s just the kind of a day I’m having).

You appeared to have used proper sentence and paragraph structure with lots of punctuation.

You didn’t mention owning a dog that I saw on quick scanning of your soliloquy.

As above. ;)
 
Last edited:
Is it just me or does it look like the steering wheel can essentially draw itself into the dashboard. Not completely flush but still essentially out of the way

It does look like it could go straight back or it looks like it could potentially fold down and then slide in with that notch on the dashboard hence why it doesn't have the top of the wheel part to stick out. Brilliant!

Not sure how an airbag would work with that though. Maybe the airbag is in the steering column and not in the wheel? That would be super slick!

Folding.png
 
Forward Observer

Batteries ~ take a moment and think about batteries. Elon said something to the effect that Semi, and van production are waiting on batteries.

Have you thought about all those supposed Tesla killers. Where are they going to get their batteries? Fossil fuel car manufacturers claiming to be rolling out EVs now; where are their mass production batteries coming from? Texas?:p

I think this is why you dont see any of the supposed Tesla killers really planning on mass production. How many of them are planning on selling 6 digit units in 2021? Any?
 
Model S and X are boutique models, they aren't going to make a bunch of steps for them.

Elon himself has said they keep S and X around for emotional attachment, they haven't been relevant to the company's financial success since the 3 launched.
The fastest production car ever made sounds like a bit more than something kept around for emotional attachment?
 
I think this is why you dont see any of the supposed Tesla killers really planning on mass production. How many of them are planning on selling 6 digit units in 2021? Any?

At least VW and Renault both sold 6 figures of EVs in 2020 so I expect they'll do that again in 2021.

(though Renault barely got there- like 103k or something)

But what the tesla killers folks don't get is those aren't competition for Tesla- they're competition for ICE cars.
 
  • Like
Reactions: gene
For all us zillionaires...

View attachment 631635

Hmm. 2022 maybe roughly when I start to think about trading in my model S. :eek:

In other news, is it just my account, or does TDA keep trying to subtly convince people to short TSLA? Every time I hit the "sell" button, it pops up as a "sell short" order as the default despite owning shares.
 
Hmm. 2022 maybe roughly when I start to think about trading in my model S. :eek:

In other news, is it just my account, or does TDA keep trying to subtly convince people to short TSLA? Every time I hit the "sell" button, it pops up as a "sell short" order as the default despite owning shares.
Never had that, but ToS occasionally puts in a sell order recommendation that I have to delete.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: LN1_Casey