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

[samppa]

Now is this downgrade due to people being excessively long or excessively short ?
Inquiring minds want to know !

Any past history of other stocks that had a high shorting rate and had margin requirements changed ?

I really have no idea why they decided so. Usually the higher the risk they associate with a given stock, lower the grade. E.g. marijuana stocks are all in grade D, which gives no margin.

 

[SebastianR]

72 cars in Norway for today already. Edit: meant to say 87 now...

 

[SPadival]

Anton Walhman's friends at The Fast Lane Car are buying a Tesla Model 3

Anton was last seen crying himself into sleep

 

[Fact Checking]

72 cars in Norway for today already. Edit: meant to say 87 now...

Picture of Norway deliveries from yesterday (seen on Reddit), with new Tesla owners queuing up:

Might become an iconic photo of a new era: traded in Mercedes on the right, the future on the left?

 

[KarenRei]

In recent history, when Elon has randomly tweeted about animals (lemur, hedgehog), it's been a prelude to new product/variant announcements.

 

[KarenRei]

Feedback re: 烏瓦's last GF3 flyover:

Hello there! This was not taken yesterday, it was the same time as the night shot. The piling you have seen has all ended and is entering the ground infrastructure. The bulldozers and excavators are close to the construction site of the Sangtang River, which is not the part of the first phase of the project we usually see, as mentioned in the video. The first phase of the project is only about a quarter of the entire Tesla Shanghai super factory. From the aerial picture, you can understand that this video is meant to convey the first phase of the Tesla Shanghai Super Factory, not the whole project. Factory construction. Very happy with your question! Thank you!

So they're actually further along than could be seen in that video - it was something like five or more days old.

 

[HG Wells]

In recent history, when Elon has randomly tweeted about animals (lemur, hedgehog), it's been a prelude to new product/variant announcements.

NOTE: Front of model 3 referred to as duck bill ?

 

[Fact Checking]

Just read in China news Tesla started offering 30% discount on Model S & X to China corporate customer and leasing company, is such huge discounts normal to clear inventory cars at quarter end? or it means S & X Refresh coming very soon?

Any thoughts?

Tencent news link: 特斯拉Model S及Model X在华降库存 七折甩卖 (in Chinese, pls use Google translate)

Model S100D: tesla.com list price rmb 783k (usd 116k), after disc rmb 550k (usd 81k)

Model X100D: tesla.com list price rmb 794k (usd 118k), after disc rmb 560k (usd 82k)

Just an update from Vincent, expert and primary source on Tesla & China, marking it as a very probable fake (tweet slightly [edited] for readability):

Vincent on Twitter

"Highly [improbable].

1/ after the recent price [reduction] in Asia, do u think there still have a lot of inventory S X left?
2/ in Taiwan, usually takes 2 months to deliver SX, with the recent price [drop], my friend’s [delivery] estimate is Aug-Sept.
3/ Unknown media [corporation] posted [this article] on QQ"​

 

[dhrivnak]

Azeotropes are a chemical process engineer's 'bea awch."

Azeotropes

But 190 proof isn't bad-- grand-pappy always said ethanol is intended for consumption not combustion. Cooking corn to burn ethanol as a transportation fuel has a negative energy balance on a life-cycle basis--it's a solution only farmers should love.

True but with the 5% water you can’t mix any gasoline which really limits you. If you get all the water out then you can mix gasoline and alcohol over a wide range for most cars.

 

[Fact Checking]

"From the aerial picture, you can understand that this video is meant to convey the first phase of the Tesla Shanghai Super Factory, not the whole project. Factory construction."

Thanks for getting this update!

BTW., I really like it how the Chinese have coined it the "Tesla Super Factory" - which naming would save Tesla an awkward re-branding effort in a couple of years, when they'll be forced to explain why their factories that are spewing out terawatt-hours of batteries per year are called 'giga' factories.

 

[jerry33]

Help me understand this, please. So we need a referral system that doesn't offer anything to the referer? Maybe amputate a toe for each referral given?

Referrals with loot are fine for your friends, family, and others that you know well. My concern is with strangers. That is, showing your car at an event gives the appearance of seeking profit rather than as an educational experience. A person who comes to TMC (for example) and sees there is such a thing as a referral, and then asks for one is a different matter because they are coming to you rather than you soliciting them.

 

[Fact Checking]

Referrals with loot are fine for your friends, family, and others that you know well. My concern is with strangers. That is, showing your car at an event gives the appearance of seeking profit rather than as an educational experience. A person who comes to TMC (for example) and sees there is such a thing as a referral, and then asks for one is a different matter because they are coming to you rather than you soliciting them.

As a first approximation not displaying the referral code on such events would be sufficient in removing the appearance of seeking profit, right? And if asked, tell them to google 'tesla referral code' instead of giving yours, and if anyone insists then either give it to them, or explain them that you only give your personal referral code to friends & family, to make your EV education efforts explicitly non-profit. Maybe there's a well known charity already in existence, with a Tesla referral code?

Any sort of 'neutral' referral code linked to your person would probably still maintain 'lingering' doubts about a profit motive, I suspect.

 

[2virgule5]

Anything about the car that was discounted that objectively explains that discount? Was it a 2018? Miles already on the car? Floor model? No issue at all with you taking Tesla up on their offer, but, they've been emphatic about not discounting on an individual basis simply to move a car here or there. Was an explicitly stated policy. Before anyone replies, lols re explicitly stated policies, a year or two ago, one of the people working at one of the stores was fired for doing this sort of thing, and my memory is that this was paired with Elon sent out a memo just after the firing re-iterating the policy.

Had the same question myself based on said policy & Elon's memo, but it's a 2019 car (made in Jan), less than 50 miles, not a floor model as far as I can tell, it was in inventory in Mt Kisko NY. The fact that a similar discount was offered to a friend in a different state tells me that it may have been 'allowed' to clear inventory of higher specs cars: basically everything below an AWD would not be in inventory when they announced price increase a couple of weeks ago. It breaks a bit the rules but will certainly make Q1 a better quarter than without this last minute push (a 5% discount on M3 AWD still gives high margins and removes a car from the inventory book).

Now that Tesla is a volume manufacturer it would not surprise me to see some upselling done this way from time to time, in limited fashion because it makes sense from a cash-flow pov, particularly in transition quarters like this one and/or when large debt repayment is due. Let's not forget that the price of these cars as well as S and X varied quite wildly up and down in the past couple of months... I used to know what each car was worth from memory, well now I need to check twice!

 

[jbcarioca]

Indeed, when saving files, I always use a YYYYMMDD at the end for easy versioning, however, while it's great for sorting, it's less readable by humans, for that the DDMMYY format is by far the superior.

I mean if it was 9:10 in the evening, you wouldn't write it 10:21, would you? What's the sense in putting the month first in the US date format.

Is there a historical reason for this?

Inherently it makes exactly zero difference what time stamp convention is used so long as the convention is clearly documented and consistent. As an person who spent the majority of 1999 wandering the planet doing Y2K (remember that?) remediation I can assure you that there a many more dating conventions than the ones you mention. The problem is consistency (I.e.reliability, accuracy and documentation). I have no personal preference at all.FWIW I use year.month.day in my own filing systems only because that allows me to organize historical searches most easily for my own logic.

I began to do that in mid 1999 as my team went through exotic efforts to match inconsistent, undocumented and illogical filing systems. As the world knows all those projects around the world worked, so the year end was largely uneventful.

Luckily for Tesla this kind of issue will not be a factor, partly because very early on, before Roadster went into production, Tesla engineers developed a system to track every single cell from original manufacture, including raw material inputs, all the way to pack installation and performance history, although the installed history is grouped by series-connected components, the history is still maintained for individual cells.

That information was disclosed in the NTSB hearings on Lithium-ion batteries in Transportation more than five years ago when a Tesla executive was the only person who actually knew enough to intelligently discuss risk mitigation. After I heard her I departed the conference, bought a ridiculously large quantity (for me) of TSLA, and shortly afterwards ordered a Model S.

All that was because of TSLA superior calendaring/tracking systems!

Were they only capable of using that same superior thought to cope with ordering, delivery, service and parts systems.

 

[Krugerrand]

My european broker just sent an e-mail that they are downgrading TSLA from b to c category. Means higher margin requirements, but its a bit unclear how much. Downgrade will happen on apr 4th.

Well, at least they are waiting for the Q1 numbers to be a miss before going public.

 

[ZeApelido]

Why is Elon tweeting about lame ducks? Stepping down? And two ducks? CEO + COO? His tweets used to be bullish af but now they scare me

View attachment 391803

New video he saw:

2 girls, 1 duck.

 

[hacer]

I mean, ICE just has to open the door.

Sure, that works if you don't mind being killed. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: Garages (AEN-207) • Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering • Iowa State University

 

[humbaba]

What I've heard Elon & JB mention a couple of times are safety concerns and concern that you need the car to be a car, not have it's range used up powering a house.

I'm not in a position to evaluate the first reason, but, the as to the second... pretty obvious most people can handle balancing that (trying not to say harsh things does make for boring phrasing, lols).

I suspect at least part of the mix is that Tesla wants to sell Power Walls and solar.

A compromise that would accommodate that last point,

Include the capability for Vehicle to Grid (well, to home) in all Tesla, BUT, only enable its functioning in the event of a major blackout. That is, just as Tesla unlocked range on software limited vehicles in the past during evacuation events (hurricanes), have a tiny team at Tesla that monitors for substantial blackouts and send an OTA to customers with vehicles registered in the region to enable the vehicle-grid.

I'm sure lots of us have ideas as consumers and shareholders... if only Elon would get around to reading my repeated tweet to him (bet he's just swamped with catching up on this thread like the rest of us).

View attachment 391782

fwiw, I've been sending this to Elon periodically for a little shy of a year now, long before Galileo started promoting a similar, but much more limited idea for shareholders to have a voice during quarterly earnings call (i.e., not trying to rip off what Galileo was part of).

To power a house off of a car would be non-trivial installation as it would require the same arrangement as a powerwall. Since powerwall is 13.5kWh and even an SR is ~50kWh I could see this as an add on to a powerwall setup. The additional hardware to connect the car as an additional battery could have an arbitrary cost to cover development of changes to powerwall needed to accommodate an extension battery that has different characteristics (capacity, not always present, presumably different charge rate, etc.).

 

[winfield100]

MP3Mike, post: 3525291, member: 42876"]I'm more interested in the outcome of this new patent Tesla that has filed for: GEOMETRY OF ROTOR END RING AND STATOR END TURNS
@elasalle
Tesla Files Patent Application For Electricity Generation That Bypasses The Grid
actually, this looks a lot like a "Virtual Power Plant" (VPP), lots of PV loosely coupled together, using smart inverters (like the enphase IQ8's not released yet) that meet or exceed the regulations Hawaii and California have in effect for their 100% renewables 'real soon now'
about 8,500+ square miles of PV, broken up into roof top sized chunks or larger could make over 4,000 terawatt hours in the US, around 100%.
i suspect Tesla Energy will make us quite happy

 

[elasalle]

just in case anyone wanna watch - lots of TSLAQ - saw Gerber and ARK ... didn't watch the whole thing though ...