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

[RobDickinson]

BREAKING: Tesla has increased the price of all US Model Y variants. All Model Y variants have increased in price by $1,000. Standard Range Model 3 is now $2,000 more. M3 Performance is $1,000 more.

• Model Y starting price: $54,990
• Model 3 starting price: $41,990 https://t.co/jfZpPhqgQe

 

[MXWing]

Price of Model 3's were just raised. It's logical to raise prices when you have a 6 month back log in demand.

Will be curious on Q3/Q4/Q1 EPS but REVENUE WILL BE THROUGH THE ROOF.

Same for McDonalds too at $9 per Big Mac Meal but where it comes together is EPS.

 

[Drezil]

I suspect the bigger end defines the spacing eliminating the need for the aluminum honeycomb or other “fixture.” In other words, the cases all touch at the big end.

The cells come out of a tightly dimensionally controlled process. It makes sense to leverage that to obtain uniform fire retardant/adhesive gaps. Weight and adhesive consumption variation should be low using this leverage.

I think it would complicate assembly more than it should.
But one could use a honeycomb-sheet to fix them, glue them to the plate, turn around, fill with epoxy (or similar) and while it cures hook up the upper side.

This way you only use cheap sheet metal instead of a block to always get them into position perfectly, easing assembly.

 

[Tslynk67]

All that being said.....I'm converting to only selling options(a la "the other thread"). Much more reliable returns and no stress.

The green part, yes, the red not 100% accurate

 

[RobDickinson]

US electric vehicle (BEV) sales Q3 2021:

Tesla Model Y 46600
Tesla Model 3 43558
Tesla Model S/X 9158
VW ID.4 6049
Ford Mach-E 5880
Chevy Bolt EV/EUV 4515
Nissan Leaf 2345
Porsche Taycan 1861
Audi GT 462
Audi e-tron+Sportback 447
BMW i3 426


That seems like around 82% of the market for tesla.

 

[nativewolf]

So 21k for everyone else and 100k for Tesla. Glad to see they are catching up

 

[Tslynk67]

Many of our members are retired and / or live outside of the USA and so I wonder if they realize how things are getting in the workplace in corporate USA. I've been in management in software engineering for over a decade. Prior to that I was a programmer for over a decade.

The company I currently work for has a presence in many states in the USA, including California. As such, all staff must undergo frequent diversity and conduct training that matches California's standards. This training is tracked and logged and it must be completed regularly for employment.

As a manager, if something inappropriate is said, I must take action and document all steps. The documentation is heavy because of the worry of justifying the actions taken, including potential termination, in case of a lawsuit.

Having been in this type of professional environment for years, I do not cuss at work and I'm careful /nervous to share any personal views at work, even something as simple as an opinion on a new movie. My friends have commented that I'm more reserved "manager mode" in my personal interactions, too.

Years prior, at a different company, I had an employee that did well on my team for years but then had an attitude shift and began causing issues. I spoke to HR and they decided to handle it directly and keep me mostly out of it (unusual but I think they were sensitive because employee was female and non-white). After several meetings with employee, HR terminated her employment. I found out when HR informed me. Afterwards, ex-employee filed a complaint with the state, named me and several other managers, and made some ridiculous claims. All my documents, emails, and records regarding her employment were frozen for 18 months and during that time I was told I may be called in for a deposition. In the end, the state dismissed it.

So, assuming Tesla followed the expected procedures with discipline, training, and documentation, what more should they have done?

My opinion is that this is an obvious money grab. I wonder if the jury was biased against Tesla and Elon Musk as a result of the constant media slant against them for the past decade. I know plenty of people that think Elon is just another spoiled rich kid that started with daddy's money. The FUD has consequences.

I also think it shows what kind of society we live in that cases like this are rewarded. Looking forward to being able to "retire" from management thanks to help from TSLA.

I think I'd last 30 minutes in a US firm

I can't abide racism, but I like to flirt with the office girls and I swear like a dunk navvy...

Millet beer, @Artful Dodger - doesn't sound appealing, I think the closest I got was some quinoa stuff they brew over here - not too bad, but a disappointingly low ABV @4.5%

 

[nativewolf]

That's walking a fine line.

The statement is very oddly worded and basically a tacit admission of guilt. I'm sure it'll get appealed and the actual fine paid might be 1-2% of the $137m.

Yep Tesla has enough smoke around the issue that's its likely a bit of problem. The award will get dismissed and redone and then they will settle with the other 100 workers.

You see issues like this on many factory floors but its sad to hear about it at our favorite company.

 

[FS_FRA]

One other data point is a YouTuber sold all his shares this morning at $795 that he bought recently at $600 due to concerns about the CCP and Tesla's exposure to China.

Pre-market OT rant: When did “YouTuber” become a quality classification? Same as “Influencer”, “Twitterati”?

>99% of all of them have no other agenda in their minds than how to increase followers and subscribers to monetise their verbal diarrhoea.

The <1% remaining - some of which have a relevant and justifiable following here - put real work in and have real good content.

But “a YouTuber” should never be part of a sentence that describes investment decisions. Especially not in a quality forum such as this (and the “other one”).

/rant over

 

[jbcarioca]

In the early ought decade, around 2003-4, I became aware of the naked-short phenomenon, invented and promulgated by Bernie Madoff. When the uptake rule was removed in 2007 (under the watch of George W. and Christopher Cox, SEC Chairman), that was the nail in the coffin for retail investors and it was a coup d'etat for the manipulators. I was a broker at the time. I can't tell you how frustrating it was to talk with anyone in my industry about this issue, because everyone thought I had a propeller hat, like they did Patrick Byrne. No one understood what the hell I was talking about.

Two years ago I talked with a just-retired lawyer for the Nasdaq and told him of my frustration. He confirmed that selling shares naked, along with the ability to sell these non-existent shares at lower and lower prices is rampant in the market and has been for quite a while. As if this advantage wasn't enough, the newest abuse of the system is long-term Fails-to Deliver. Since the big firms own and operate FINRA (literally), the NGO that is responsible for reporting FTD, they have found they can get away with misreporting, or not reporting at all, the amount and durations of the FTDs. As I have mentioned before, the only thing that can force the delivery of these "air shares", is the distribution of new split shares or the distribution of a whole new equity, such as in a spinoff to shareholders. Bastids.

We cannot forget the more arcane, but fundamental, key to all this. It would be considered fraud were it not codified. The DTCC website provides explicit statement, in fine print:

CNS^®

As NSCC's core netting, allotting and fail-control engine, CNS System settles trades from the nation's major exchanges, markets and other sources. Learn more.

www.dtcc.com

• Closing fail positions are marked-to-market daily and re-netted with new transactions, which reduces risk.
• While CNS deliveries are made automatically using Members’ depository positions, Members can exempt certain short positions to avoid segregation violations and effectively meet other delivery needs.

This is sufficiently arcane that few regulators understand it. The Depositary Trust Company is mostly invisible. Without it naked shorts could not execute. Bizarrely those quotations are part of the Continuous Net Settlement process, thought by nearly everyone to mitigate settlement risk.

I first worked on this stuff first when I was fresh from graduate school sent to help DTC with a process I had never heard of. Following that I learned much more while developing Global Custody and Global Master Trust products. Later coped with the operational side of this as a consultant to DOT on LTCM and then several years worth of merger integration for failed institutions. The major element featured throughout is that senior executives and their regulators do not know how their own processes work.

Most of us and many brilliant people are ignorant of how screwed retail investors actually are when buying and selling any derivative and how fragile the institutional structures really are.
I could go on.

Sadly the one Treasury Secretary and multiple CEO’s with whom I dealt all seemed proud of their ignorance. Brilliant to enable naked shorts and failure to deliver over indefinite time. Brilliant! Madoff and his rule never ended, and that was not even smart deception.

 

[MC3OZ]

We cannot forget the more arcane, but fundamental, key to all this. It would be considered fraud were it not codified. The DTCC website provides explicit statement, in fine print:

CNS^®

As NSCC's core netting, allotting and fail-control engine, CNS System settles trades from the nation's major exchanges, markets and other sources. Learn more.

www.dtcc.com

• Closing fail positions are marked-to-market daily and re-netted with new transactions, which reduces risk.
• While CNS deliveries are made automatically using Members’ depository positions, Members can exempt certain short positions to avoid segregation violations and effectively meet other delivery needs.

This is sufficiently arcane that few regulators understand it. The Depositary Trust Company is mostly invisible. Without it naked shorts could not execute. Bizarrely those quotations are part of the Continuous Net Settlement process, thought by nearly everyone to mitigate settlement risk.

I first worked on this stuff first when I was fresh from graduate school sent to help DTC with a process I had never heard of. Following that I learned much more while developing Global Custody and Global Master Trust products. Later coped with the operational side of this as a consultant to DOT on LTCM and then several years worth of merger integration for failed institutions. The major element featured throughout is that senior executives and their regulators do not know how their own processes work.

Most of us and many brilliant people are ignorant of how screwed retail investors actually are when buying and selling any derivative and how fragile the institutional structures really are.
I could go on.

Sadly the one Treasury Secretary and multiple CEO’s with whom I dealt all seemed proud of their ignorance. Brilliant to enable naked shorts and failure to deliver over indefinite time. Brilliant! Madoff and his rule never ended, and that was not even smart deception.

For every naked short there is a buyer.

What happens on a fail to deliver?

The buyer is expecting shares.

I am only familiar with a central share registry, and netting of all positions.
I don't understand why the buyer doesn't know that they don't have the shares they paid for.

Perhaps they settle after options expiry when call options are not exercised?

 

[SPadival]

One other data point is a YouTuber sold all his shares this morning at $795 that he bought recently at $600 due to concerns about the CCP and Tesla's exposure to China.

I wish every YouTuber did this (with the exception of Rob, Dave & a couple of others).

Edit: BTW, never heard of this guy until today. And I regularly trawl YouTube for Tesla content (99.99% of them are clickbait garbage).

 

[jw934]

I don't understand why the buyer doesn't know that they don't have the shares they paid for.

Perhaps they settle after options expiry when call options are not exercised?

Buyers might not know they don't have the shares because either their brokers or somewhere up the chain provided ownership share count different from Tesla's books.

Not sure if you saw the post-split issue where several here in TMC did not get the new shared added to their accounts for days. ( I got mine immediately ).

My thinking (about the delay) is that the books got messed up somewhere and somebody needed time to that figure out and journal the share dividends to the correct accounts, and to buy extra shares from the market, if needed, to make whole .

 

[WarpedOne]

I don't understand why the buyer doesn't know that they don't have the shares they paid for.

Because he does not need to know.
There are a lot of middlemen, all of them having their own books full of I-Ow-You and You-ow-Me lines.
Not all buyers have voting rights, especially here in EU where I need to pay additional fee to get voting rights.
To get those rights, the seller of my shares needs to close some of those lines and someone may end up needing to go to the market and buy a 'named share' to assign it down the line ending with me.

During normal sailing there ain't no such need, X-ows-Y lines need not be closed, voting rights need not be assigned to end buyer.
At share dividend event I needed to wait until Thursday to get what was legally mine from Monday morning already.

 

[jw934]

And I regularly trawl YouTube for Tesla content (99.99% of them are clickbait garbage).

You got an agree from me.

The ones I still follow on YouTube are:
Rob (Tesla Daily)
Yashu (Hit That Bid)
Dave (Dave Lee on Investing)
(Tesla Economist)
Dillion (Electrified)
Jorden (The Limiting Factor)
. . plus perhaps 2 or 3 more.

But I no longer (starting today) do YouTube search for "Tesla" to watch random videos.

 

[jbcarioca]

For every naked short there is a buyer.

What happens on a fail to deliver?

The buyer is expecting shares.

I am only familiar with a central share registry, and netting of all positions.
I don't understand why the buyer doesn't know that they don't have the shares they paid for.

Perhaps they settle after options expiry when call options are not exercised?

Technically the fails do not appear on the ultimate buyer’s account.
You, as a customer are credited, although the shares do not yet truly exist.
The ultimate ‘seller’ in thus case has no shares to sell, hence fails to deliver. You never see that because at DTC they simply make a book entry (logically like a overdraft) showing the seller with a negative position.
Since these are securities, not money, the seller is naked and us exposed to loss or gain when, or if, they ever settle.
Again, a retail or institutional buyer never sees this.
if there is a share split this is all quite inconvenient because the seller is liable for number of shares, not monetary value.

Yes, as I showed above the DTCC/DTC do operate a continuous settlement system, but has giant sized loopholes, disclosed in arcane and very fine print, understood by few.

Options and forwards as well as other derivatives are quite different. Bluntly those are designed to mask costs to buyer of these instruments while giving gigantic profits to originators.
The regulations governing these protect only originators. Retail and even institutions usually lose by using these instruments. The legitimate use for hedging sometimes comes with better pricing, but that is almost exclusively for insiders.

Enthusiasts, including some who know better, think they can ‘beat the house’ . They cannot. Using these is quite similar to casino gambling. Some win, for a long time. Eventually the house wins. The only winners have the ability to manipulate the system.

Long ago most of this was illegal. During the last few decades the US has systematically dismantled all investor protections while keeping protective vocabulary.

 

[scaesare]

The cans are definitely stressed members and there is no metallic honeycomb structure. It's simply cans glued together. I see no other way to interpret this verbiage from Elon on 2020 Battery Day, plus the slides.

"[The structural pack] also allows us to pack cells more densely because we do not have intermediate structures in the battery pack...instead of just having a filler that is a flame retardant...we have a filler that is a structural adhesive as well as flame retardant. So, it effectively glues the cells to the top and bottom sheet, and this allows you to do shear transfer between the upper and lower sheet, just like if you have like a Formula 1 craft or like a racing boat, and you have carbon fiber face sheets and, say, aluminum honeycomb in between them, this gives incredible stiffness and it's really the way any super-fast thing works...we can actually use the steel shell case of the battery to transfer shear from the upper and lower face sheet which makes for an incredibly stiff structure, even stiffer than a regular car...I really think that long term, any cars that do not take this architecture will not be competitive."

View attachment 718180

Ah thanks for the quote... that was more along the lines of what my impression was as well coming out of battery day.

 

[22522]

We cannot forget the more arcane, but fundamental, key to all this. It would be considered fraud were it not codified. The DTCC website provides explicit statement, in fine print:

CNS^®

As NSCC's core netting, allotting and fail-control engine, CNS System settles trades from the nation's major exchanges, markets and other sources. Learn more.

www.dtcc.com

• Closing fail positions are marked-to-market daily and re-netted with new transactions, which reduces risk.
• While CNS deliveries are made automatically using Members’ depository positions, Members can exempt certain short positions to avoid segregation violations and effectively meet other delivery needs.

This is sufficiently arcane that few regulators understand it. The Depositary Trust Company is mostly invisible. Without it naked shorts could not execute. Bizarrely those quotations are part of the Continuous Net Settlement process, thought by nearly everyone to mitigate settlement risk.

I first worked on this stuff first when I was fresh from graduate school sent to help DTC with a process I had never heard of. Following that I learned much more while developing Global Custody and Global Master Trust products. Later coped with the operational side of this as a consultant to DOT on LTCM and then several years worth of merger integration for failed institutions. The major element featured throughout is that senior executives and their regulators do not know how their own processes work.

Most of us and many brilliant people are ignorant of how screwed retail investors actually are when buying and selling any derivative and how fragile the institutional structures really are.
I could go on.

Sadly the one Treasury Secretary and multiple CEO’s with whom I dealt all seemed proud of their ignorance. Brilliant to enable naked shorts and failure to deliver over indefinite time. Brilliant! Madoff and his rule never ended, and that was not even smart deception.

There are several reasons to invest in Tesla. An important one is that Elon knows this, and periodically closes the door on them.

There is relatively safe money to be made by swing trading (getting on the trampoline as other people manipulate a stock that has intrinsic value), but that is not really investing - I don't do that anymore.

 

[jw934]

Pre-market OT rant: When did “YouTuber” become a quality classification? Same as “Influencer”, “Twitterati”?

>99% of all of them have no other agenda in their minds than how to increase followers and subscribers to monetise their verbal diarrhoea.

The <1% remaining - some of which have a relevant and justifiable following here - put real work in and have real good content.

But “a YouTuber” should never be part of a sentence that describes investment decisions. Especially not in a quality forum such as this (and the “other one”).

/rant over

Many here and elsewhere have (unfounded, IMO) concerns about China and Giga-Shanghai eg. Chinese supply chain, flood, economy, privacy, favouritism, military confrontation within the Seven Dotted Lines countries, and tension with US and other military power countries. I would have ignored the word “YouTuber” and think about the concern expressed and action take to see if I need to do anything. I don’t.

To add a bit of value to this post, Biden announced this morning agreement with Xi that regional peace in the matter of Taiwan is a priority for both countries. Should be a small step to ease the Tesla China concerns of some “not-a-YouTuber” Tesla investors.

Biden says he and China's Xi agree to abide by Taiwan agreement

U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that he has spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about Taiwan and they agreed to abide by the "Taiwan agreement", as tensions have ratcheted up between Taipei and Beijing.

www.reuters.com

 

[scaesare]

I think the most likely path was layed out by "the limiting factor".

4680 have a bigger ring-like end in one side where the copper contracts are. This you can just drop them in the Aluminium honeycomb & they will fall into position (sandy would approve!). Then you put a heat transfer compound-glue on it and seal it with a lid.
Turn it 180 degrees, now you have the other contact side of the batteries always perfect in the same position for the individual fuses. Then lay busbars on it, have bms-stuff in flexible PCBs, everything quite even, fill up with epoxy, put lid on, done.

I think this would be an easy, fast & compact way to assemble it. And could be completely automated.

If the cells have adhesive on the top and bottom, then that implies it's the honeycomb carrier that's the primary structural component, not the cells themselves At least in the traditional "honeycomb" sense of the word where the sandwich supplies torsional rigidity in addition to shear strength.

For the cell cans to really be structural members, they would need to be bonded to each neighboring cell along the vertical axis where they make contact. In the scenario above they are only bonded on the ends and would "float" in the carrier rather than being bonded along the sides.

If the cell is designed as you mention with a large end cap radius and there is no carrier, then the end cap would prevent the cell cans from being able to touch and be bonded.


This would seem to be a departure from what was described on battery day.