The absolute delivery numbers have very little meaning from an investment perspective because the share price at any given time is a distillation of the public information the numbers are derived from. In other words, the information and assumptions that go into making an accurate estimate are far more important than the numbers themselves and that information is already public and neither that info nor those assumptions can be derived from the delivery numbers, at least not with enough accuracy to be very meaningful. It's likely that the final estimate, even when very close to the actual numbers, is the result of assumptions that contain larger errors than the final estimate itself (errors in various assumptions tend to cancel out each other and revert to the mean). Delivery numbers dilute the value of the really important underlying information. The exercise of coming up with the estimate is more useful than the estimate itself and the accuracy of the estimate is not a very good indicator of the accuracy of the more important underlying individual assumptions.
As an investor, I've never understood the focus on delivery estimates in this early stage of Tesla's growth. A much more useful metric would be a rolling production capacity index. Of course this game is not as fun because there is never final confirmation of that number. An even more useful metric would be an estimation of production efficiency and how it changes over time. But the real reason quarterly delivery numbers are not that useful from a perspective of timing investments is that the market already has all the information that goes into estimating deliveries and that information is more important the delivery numbers themselves.
Delivery estimates would be a useful tool if the products were demand constrained because then those numbers would represent the trend of buyer sentiment. But Tesla has never really been demand constrained so chasing delivery numbers provides very little useful information considering the market has already taken into account most of what those numbers are derived from. First principles thinking wants to focus directly on the underlying metrics like production capacity and efficiency.
erikwernquist.com
