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

[elasalle]

looks like it's gonna try to test 100MA @ 910
there's also a gap from 909 to 950

 

[Big Time]

We will push thru 1000 again soon!

 

[Nocturnal]

The TMCAI* is flashing buy.

(*TMC Antipathy Index)

I need to see a little more bickering first.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Ross Gerber appeared on Yahoo! Finance saying he has absolutely zero concerns about Tesla, and that they are stronger in their Markets than even Apple in the days of Steve Jobs and the iPhone:

... from the viewpoint of certain positions, Tesla being the one I'm least concerned of any stock I have ever owned.

I have never seen a company dominate being such a, even Apple with Steve Jobs in the cusp of the iphone days wasn't as dominant as Tesla is today.

In the Markets that they're in the one thing that I don't spend any time worrying about at all is Tesla.

Cheers!

 

[woodisgood]

Insidious Reuters article about a Paris taxi service that is suspending all 37 of its Model 3s in its fleet after an off-duty driver had an accident in one. The implication being something something self driving/autopilot dangerous something something, without actually mentioning or even postulating any of those features were involved. Article confirms Tesla said nothing was dysfunctional with the car.

The subconscious effect of this kind of BS cannot be overstated. It is so desperate but it must continue to be countered, as tiring as the exercise is.

 

[Xd85]

Q: Looking at all these other OEMs "investing 10s of $B" over next x years for electrification. Where are they getting funds from? Surely they're not generating FCF, operating margin and cash pile, are they?

I am genuinely interested to know if anyone had any insight into this.

 

[woodisgood]

I need to see a little more bickering first.

Ok, I‘ll do my best to kick it off:

*insert judgy thoughts about investing philosophies*

*insert some technical analysis*

*insert irrelevant work or investing experience*

*insert complaining about others’ irrelevant posts*

*insert political comment that triggers at least 25% of the thread participants*

*close with some suggestions about how Tesla/Elon should do things*

 

[dl003]

We will push thru 1000 again soon!

In 2 weeks I hope.

 

[2daMoon]

In 2 weeks I hope.

2 weeks?

REALLY?

/jk

 

[wws]

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.

IMHO, the other automakers (perhaps excluding Toyota) finally recognized they had a problem the day after Model 3 reservations went on-line. Though it was pretty clear to me much earlier than that - especially when Tesla started building the Gigafactory in Nevada. Glad I don't, at least directly, own any GM or F stock. (We do have a little XOM - but I think that will still be ok for some years. Like it or not, ICE will be with us for a long time.)

 

[Hock1]

I am genuinely interested to know if anyone had any insight into this.

That's a great point. That negative S-curve is going to kill a lot of them. I think the only way for the survivors to survive for the long term will be A) Help from Tesla in the form of licensing tech or, B) the judicious use of funds that the government will eventually have to supply.

 

[Zextraterrestrial]

2022 is still very much a work in progress but I am currently modeling $86.7B in sales on 1.5m deliveries (plus energy and services):
...

Isn't 1.5M a bit on the low side? My thought is ~2M vehicles.
Adding 2 facilities which each should push out 500K by the end of the year & Shanghai at a rate of well over 500k/yr. Some Semi trucks coming from Nevada too. My thought is that Shanghai will do something like 800k next year unless there is some bottleneck preventing that? delivery trucks/paint line etc ..what is the expected current capacity of these factories? Fremont >500k. Berlin 300k min? Texas 300k min(2022) ... are the new factories not going to ramp faster?
With castings and shorter production times & lines I think these numbers are very underestimated as long as all pieces & batteries are available.

 

[MABMAB]

Paraphrasing Musk on dividends: It means that a company does not have innovative products to invest in. Not the case with TSLA and will give me pause to exit if they start one.

 

[mars_or_bust]

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.

In fact, I don't think it is a coincidence that Kimbal Musk is working on just such a system: Square Roots
Not offtopic, as it points to a VERY concerted, multidecadal, push towards a sustainable Mars mission, using all Musk companies - including Elon's brother.

 

[Curt Renz]

From my brokerage's newsfeed:

Wall Street could crumble under the weight of a 'carbon bubble,' these groups warn​

1:23 pm ET December 14, 2021 (MarketWatch)

By Rachel Koning Beals

Stock investors deserve to know companies' climate-change exposure now, not in 30 years, SEC's Crenshaw says

If Wall Street were a country, it would be the fifth-largest emitter of atmosphere-warming carbon emissions, nestling it right between Russia and Indonesia, a new report says.

A study with a title warning of "Wall Street's Carbon Bubble" by the Sierra Club and the left-leaning Center for American Progress released Tuesday shows that eight of the largest U.S. banks and 10 of the largest U.S. asset managers combined to finance an estimated 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions based on year-end disclosures from 2020.

And bank funding of the oil patch and industrial heavyweights comes even with many financial concerns pledging to cut their own emissions. These companies have been generally embracing, at least through comments, the world's push to slow climate change, including at the recently-concluded U.N. gathering in Glasgow...

 

[Unpilot]

If you want dividends, you can always buy a solid company that has the bulk of its growth behind it and I'm glad Elon doesn't waste time on questions about dividends, something that's not up to him to decide (individually) anyway.

Someone wanted a little more bickering, so let me quibble about this.

If (and I don't see this happening maybe ever) Mr. Musk wanted to give dividends, it would happen pronto.
So while it is not up to him to decide individually ....if he individually decided he wanted it...it would be done.

 

[st_lopes]

This is complete nonsense FUD. Ford specificaly breaks out their automotive EBIT on their earnings report. That number YTD through the first 3 quarters is a profit of 5.767 billion

The same FUD that TSLA is exposed to with SBC and EV Credit Sales?

And you ignore the interest charge that is 100% related to Automotive? Yet you include pension obligation gains that are entirely a future expenditure reduction (assuming investments in their portfolio don't drop)?

One thing is for certain - American OEMs employ an army of financial engineers. Strip away the noise and you'll quickly see that their operating margins for automotive are awful.

Back out the stuff that has nothing to do with F's vehicle sales and you have a structurally non-profitable business. At least based on their current volumes. If they manage to get production back to 2019 levels, then maybe that perspective changes.

$90B in sales, less $82B in Cost of Sales, less $8.7B in selling costs (that almost exclusively relates to vehicle sales), less $1.4B Interest Expense (again ONLY relates to their vehicles divisions), ignoring Other Income (RIVN revaluation as well as Global Pension revaluation), and again you end up with an objectively negative operating margin for all things related to their vehicle business.

Their segment disclosure is financial engineering at its finest. It's taking large expense buckets and putting them in stand-alone categories in an attempt to frame that as unrelated to the vehicle business.

To tie this back to Tesla, it's one reason that I appreciate the transparency and simplicity of their quarterly and annual disclosures. This is coming from someone who deals with public company disclosures for a living. F and GM remind me of legacy GE. Layers of financial engineering interplay all to try to paint things in rosy lights, when the underlying data clearly shows you structural issues.

 

[thx1139]

So do we think Elon has accelerated his sales to get them all done before the end of the year. In the reconciliation bill our there new taxes that make it advantageous to get all the sales done by year end?

 

[22522]

I don't understand why any opinion about Elon dollar cost averaging out to meet financial obligations has any validity.

All it does for me is make one a candidate for an ignore list for "motivated speech not founded in objective fact." Manipulation has no place on my information feed.

 

[MTL_HABS1909]

Long gone are the days of “Monday can’t come soon enough”