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

[TheTalkingMule]

There's a lot of incentive for him to wrap it up this year actually. He would pay more taxes on anything he sells next year if the BBB plan passes I believe. I could be wrong so maybe someone can correct me on that.

Which is part of the reason I see further downside considering how the market has been able to front run every Elon sell.

I'm starting to think you're right. That kind of clear consensus usually means you'll turn out to be wrong!

Cramer was yapping this morning about buying on the 8th to last day of the trading year always being profitable. I think we'll see these same shenanigans keep rolling until maybe Elon's 2nd to last chunk of sales. Then the turn will be made to FOMO.

I welcome $910 on Monday with open arms and have my plan to lever up with LEAPs. Will document it for discussion in the Rage Conversion thread I'm about to start.

 

[elasalle]

There's a lot of incentive for him to wrap it up this year actually. He would pay more taxes on anything he sells next year if the BBB plan passes I believe. I could be wrong so maybe someone can correct me on that.

Which is part of the reason I see further downside considering how the market has been able to front run every Elon sell.

If there was incentive to wrap up everything this year, why did he mostly sell just once per week for the past 4-6 weeks?
At most he will likely follow this pattern - unless he is planning a X'Mas gift rave /fireworks ...

... no one knows

+ were it not for the Hertz deal/ spike ... SP would have been in the stinkers by now.

++ market likely remains this way until Fed notes released tomorrow ...

+++ Any one see Santa yet

 

[Skipdd]

I bought the sale at $939. Done again for a bit.

 

[tivoboy]

I think it's crazy that the market applauds an automaker when they announce they will spend $50-150billion on the EV transition. Just throw the whole company away and start over at that point.

In nearly ALL things, the first step toward making progress = is recognizing you have a problem… at this point, pretty much all OEM have seen the writing on the wall - as evidenced and proven out by our dear Tesla, so yes, the markets and analysts and consumers will give them credit for that.

Markets will give them credit for this and penalize them for continuing to say, “ICE forever!”… but but, HYDROGEN (0kay, I do believe that hydrogen will be a significant part of the mix in 10-15 years) or but but SOLID STATE! (Okay, yeah too to solid state)… Step one, recognize that you RECOGNIZE the problem, then figure out step two.

 

[MABMAB]

$946 in premarket. We'll be green by 9:15. You heard it here first!

You being wrong is an example of what I mentioned this am. Not being able to put a finger on the pulse of the market and TSLA makes it an avoid for short term plays.

 

[aronth5]

Yup, thanks for pointing that out. You saved me some time on writing that post. Ford has been fudging earnings all year. They'll likely continue to be able to do this for the next couple of quarters while inventory is tight and their Rivian stake holds up before the lock out period ends, but once those two factors crumbled....and they will.....the curtain will close on Ford. It's going to be fun to watch.

Stating the demise of an American company is "is going to be fun to watch" really isn't warranted. If it does happen an awful lot of good people get hurt.

 

[traxila]

That doesn’t make sense, you are borrowing money and paying interest on it, which is non deductible. Why should you need to pay income tax over borrowed money? If you refinance your home, and take money out, do you pay tax on that money as well? No!

This is very easy to tailor to the demographic they want to target. First off, drop real estate.

Then have it only apply to people with a certain net worth. Doesn’t matter if people on the edges play games to come in below. What you really want is to stop billionaires from living like billionaires without paying taxes. Cutoff can be really high and still apply. Let’s say 50 million. But this MUST be indexed to inflation. Tired of goverment leaving cutoffs in hard numbers and then fifty years later huge numbers of people are getting hit with it.

See me talking about 50 years later? I must be an optimist…

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Stating the demise of an American company is "is going to be fun to watch" really isn't warranted. If it does happen an awful lot of good people get hurt.

Companies go under all the time because they can't compete. Those people that lose their jobs will get ample opportunities elsewhere, including at Tesla...where they will be paid better and enjoy the rewards of their hard work through equity instead of what they get at Ford or GM.

Sorry but I hold zero sympathy for companies that fought against the EV transition for most of the past couple of decades and just now change their tune because they want some of Tesla's valuation.

 

[MABMAB]

Even seasoned pro Gary Black could well be wrong about today and selling, pressure could still be from Elon.

 

[Cherry Wine]

I gotta say, the early morning rally had me fooled. Looks like we're in for the slow bleed. Interesting note, in terms of share price, we're already almost as far from the most recent top ($1229) as we were from the top in January ($883-$563). In terms of percentages, still would have a ways to go (36% vs current drop of ~24%).

 

[SmokyPeat]

There's a lot of incentive for him to wrap it up this year actually. He would pay more taxes on anything he sells next year if the BBB plan passes I believe. I could be wrong so maybe someone can correct me on that.

Which is part of the reason I see further downside considering how the market has been able to front run every Elon sell.

I would normally agree with that assessment, except that Elon doesn't seem to be making an effort to minimize taxes here. If I wasn't significantly leveraged out, it wouldn't make much difference to me if he rips off the band-aid this year, or spreads it out into next year. But as it stands, ripping the band-aid probably wouldn't serve me well.

 

[dl003]

There's a lot of incentive for him to wrap it up this year actually. He would pay more taxes on anything he sells next year if the BBB plan passes I believe. I could be wrong so maybe someone can correct me on that.

Which is part of the reason I see further downside considering how the market has been able to front run every Elon sell.

If money was important to him, we wouldn't be seeing this kind of open market selling.

 

[LightngMcQueen]

For those using Interactive Brokers ... TWS would be affected as it is using the log4j library. < 2.15.
Here are technical details on the issue: CVE-2021-44228 - GitHub Advisory Database and affected TWS files:

FYI it appears that IBKR fixed it .. if your TWS is set to latest and autoupdate, you should have automatically received fix, containing new version of log4j, yesterday.

 

[henchman24]

Elon doesn't really care about the stock price or taxes... when he does comment he likes to say the stock is too high or that he pays a lot of taxes. He likes to make points more than anything. His letting the stock bleed because of the tax code is a point to sell in this manner. He could have done a secondary without nearly as much impact, but then people would have weaponized that against him. Here he is selling a clear and transparent way that doesn't keep the stock price up, and he still has to pay a crap ton of taxes. He's doing this in the manner that makes the strongest point possible and he can always come back and say he did it in a transparent manner.

Now he's doing it this year to avoid some taxes and after a quarter that was sure to have a run up. So he's playing a game, but he's simply doing it in a manner that he can use to make a point. He will finish off after ~5 more sales which are all likely to come by the end of the year. Where Tesla will be announcing record sales again and have a huge Q4 that elevates beyond this noise.

 

[Motor Mouth]

The TMCAI* is flashing buy.

(*TMC Antipathy Index)

 

[tivoboy]

3.8B other income was driven almost entirely driven by market revaluation of pension adjustments. Their profit last year was a mark to market of RVN. You can of course pick whichever narrative you want. They will also have another Other Income entry in Q4 courtesy RVN. There will be a mark to market as of the IPO and revaluation of those assets under US GAAP at year end as well (that will flow to Net Income). I'm sure you'll just chalk that up to another record quarter for them as well?

This last point is indeed true, as I noted above.. but that did not impact that actual Q2 or Q3 reported revs.. in Q4 when reporting Q3 number they did say that most likely for Q4 they would be adjusting UP the MTM for Q2 for the valuation of RIVN, but when they reported G2 and Q3, this was not the case at the time.

 

[Unpilot]

 

[tivoboy]

I gotta say, the early morning rally had me fooled. Looks like we're in for the slow bleed. Interesting note, in terms of share price, we're already almost as far from the most recent top ($1229) as we were from the top in January ($883-$563). In terms of percentages, still would have a ways to go (36% vs current drop of ~24%).

Numbers over longer periods of time don’t remain fixed.. so a price target - and even % changes and measurements, top to bottom, what is the top (this is one that I do a lot of work on to find a better nominal amount than the obvious) DO change with all the intrinsic and extrinsic changes that have occurred in between. Easy example, just inflation adjusting a number over various time periods is going to give you a more indicative price target, but it doesn’t stop there.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

You being wrong is an example of what I mentioned this am. Not being able to put a finger on the pulse of the market and TSLA makes it an avoid for short term plays.

I disagree. Today I assumed Elon wouldn't be selling and we'd see a low volume flat/green day. No idea if Elon's selling or not, but it didn't happen. Yet I was still able to "profit" in the short term.

To be safe I rolled half of my $940/840 sold put spreads to next week and was paid $7 per share to do so. If things get worse, I'll roll the other half and get paid for that as well. If we don't recover next week, I'll roll again. And so on.

TSLA should easily recover to well beyond $940+ by the time 4Q earnings is digested and these will eventually expire worthless with me keeping all the premiums. It's just a busier version of HODL'ing.

 

[Alchemist42]

As a lifelong sci-fi'er I love space and the big ideas, but as an engineer I am a bit flummoxed by the Mars happy talk I see here and elsewhere. Even if we get a tiny human presence under some Martian domes at incredible risk and expense over the next decades, there is no conceivable way to live sustainably on Mars. I loved "The Martian" (movie) but as best we can tell, can't actually grow anything on Martian soil, even cleverly bringing our own bacteria. Soil microbes cannot survive in any of the heavy-metal-contaminated toxic "soil" (really pulverized regolith) that we know of on Mars. And even if they could, we now know it took those early microbes 1-2 billion (!) years to form the biological substrate that plants eventually were able to utilize here on Terra Firma - and that was done with better atmosphere and solar conditions, a Van Allen belt to shield them, a temperature above 0, life-friendly oceans (!) and many other helpful terra-centric factors.
I dearly hope we all put 99% of our resources on saving this planet over the next 50 years. It's where we have to live for the VERY FAR foreseeable future. Glad to see Tesla doing this and glad to see some of what SpaceX does, but priorities, folks! Climate crisis (and related deforestation/biodiversity crisis) MUST be the priority.

TL;DR Mars is not suitable for human civilization any time soon. Let's help Tesla work to keep earth that way!

I'm not disputing any of your points, I mostly just wanted to correct the incorrect prior statement and add some speculation about clever engineering. Of course a self-sustaining civilisation on Mars, especially with true terraforming as you seem to be alluding to, is no question far beyond current technology, but a small outpost could very well be soon within the realm of possibility. While "The Martian" has some inaccuracies, it is worth pointing out that even in the context of the movie or the book, the Mars mission was never about establishing a permanent presence on the planet and therefore there was no dedicated farming equipment. However, as the Dutch will gladly tell you, the most productive agriculture in the world does not need any soil at all, just a big hydroponic greenhouse, nutrients, CO2 and a moderate amount of sunlight. All of this should in the grand scheme of things be doable on Mars without too much difficulty (compared to getting there in the first place, at least). Any progress made in this regard is incidentally also very useful on Earth, especially when it comes to maximizing agricultural yields in inhospitable regions and establishing a true cyclic economy. Any aspiration that helps people achieve these goals is a good thing, even if the Martian settlement does not come to fruition within our lifetimes.