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

[M|S|M MYP]

Take with a huge helping of salt...................delivery numbers for China for just Sept 25th

https://twitter.com/x/status/1574309945419657218

Total is 8,634 deliveries in a single day. If Tesla was in fact setting up delivery logistics to deliver all across China in the final two weeks (and especially the last week) like they do in the US, this is what it would look like.

How do you get 8634 deliveries in one day from this tweet?

 

[elasalle]

How do you get 8634 deliveries in one day from this tweet?

Understand Chinese

found a lurker

https://twitter.com/x/status/1574391699769815040

I miss twitter, because I lost my password for my fake account with old yahoo email

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

How do you get 8634 deliveries in one day from this tweet?

The numbers in the 200's are the deliveries for that day and each row is a different province in China. Unless translate did it wrong when I input it.

 

[thesmokingman]

Understand Chinese

found a lurker

https://twitter.com/x/status/1574391699769815040

I miss twitter, because I lost my password for my fake account with old yahoo email

I'm surprised he can even read at all.

 

[bkp_duke]

I need to shake the sofa again. Those 2025 LEAPS are like crack cocaine at this price . . .

 

[Drumheller]

Yeah, due to their fundamentals and forward PE /s

Say what you will, TwTR is the winner of this entire market crash. Out of all of the major tech companies, Twtr sits on top having evaded most of this storm, a lot at Tsla shareholder's expense.

An amazing win for Twitter. Twitter is essentially worthless. No secret sauce in the programming code. Staff that barely work. A user base that, I believe, is at least 50% bots. All on a technology platform that could be duplicated for far less than a billion.

 

[Singuy]

An amazing win for Twitter. Twitter is essentially worthless. No secret sauce in the programming code. Staff that barely work. A user base that, I believe, is at least 50% bots. All on a technology platform that could be duplicated for far less than a billion.

So you are saying it's not worth the gigantic lump dump of Tsla and weeks of smear campaign against Elon for Twitter?

 

[Words of HABIT]

It isn’t just me raising the topic. That is why I mentioned this here: The negative Musk and Tesla stories must figure more prominently in many people’s feeds than I realized.

As for me personally and joking aside, I’m looking for a real relationship and a long term match. Nature and the planet are important. Musk is doing a lot of good in that regard. I’d rather find out sooner than later that someone doesn’t share that view of the world.

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: The Perpetual Investors' Roundable and Dating Service.

I get it. Thankfully my wife gets it. She is more pro-Tesla than I am, so I consider myself one lucky guy. I do feel for those that have a spouse that is taken in by the FUD.

 

[Electroman]

Zé's Guide For What To Be Impressed By Any Optimus Demo

While I'm definitely no expert, having a background in both machine / deep learning and modeling and simulation of robotic humanoids gives me some decent insight into where the challenges are, and therefore what would be really impressive to see if there is any Optimus prototype demo.

First, I would really like to dampen some expectations I'm reading. Having Optimus accomplish any task that requires movement of the feet would be really impressive. Accomplishing this is absolutely not a given as it is one of the core challenges in robotics (also why I incorrectly didn't even think they would do a bipedal humanoid form).

Look at some of the leaders in walking robots

Spoiler: Asimo

Spoiler: Agility Robotics

Spoiler: Atlas

Asimo is clearly totally preprogrammed with routines so less impressive than the latter two which show some ability to navigate difficult "new" terrain.

One of the core challenges is robotics is navigating sudden contact forces when you first touch a surface or an object. Humans have an "internal model" of the environment and make a guess what the mechanical properties of the object are before touching them. We use this to first estimate both our limb poses and what acceleration and velocity we should approach the object at.

Imagine trying step on pavement vs stepping on ice. The pavement is stiffer so naturally you will with a bit more relaxed muscles & joints so they can absorb the impact appropriately. However because you are very confident about what the surface is, you could push with confidence and higher impact forces. You can also step with a longer stride because you know what the frictional forces will be.

With ice, you know the surface is more slipperly, but also less predictable. You will step in a more crouched stance (because this gives you a better ability to change the direction and magnitude of contact forces, but requires more energy). You will also take smaller steps because less friction requires you too by laws of physics. You will also co-contract more muscles to ensure higher stability in case you are wrong on what the surface will do.

The robots operate more like they are on ice, even if they aren't. They make a more crouched position, and make small steps with less horizontal velocity. They attempt to stomp down almost vertically to reduce the effects of uncertainty around how much friction there is.

So they are certainly not as good as humans, even the best ones. I'm saying all of this to point out that balance is an extremely challenging task. If you mess up estimation of the surface, you will likely fall over.


My ranking of demo tasks by impressiveness from least impressive to most:

1. Arm-only movements that move an object
2. Arm-only movements that grasp and move a stiff object
3. Standing robot that can move arms around but doesn't touch anything
4. Standing robot that can grasp a stiff object
5. Robot that can take steps on flat surface
6. Robot that can walk and navigate multiple surfaces (Asimo level)
7. Robot that can navigate variable unknown surfaces (Agility / Atlas level)
8. Arm-only robot that can grasp and move delicate objects without crushing them (think raspberries)
9. Arm-only robot that can grasp and move variable delicate objects with crushing them.
10. 7 & 10 combined.

To be honest, even have an arm only robot accomplish #2 within a year is decent progress.

A robot that can stand and grasp an object (#4) would be amazing progress.

Anything above that, considering the pace of development, would IMO already make Tesla leaders in humanoid robotics.

This is not funny.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

I'm surprised he can even read at all.

That is a parody account if you did not already know

 

[jkirkwood001]

It isn’t just me raising the topic. That is why I mentioned this here: The negative Musk and Tesla stories must figure more prominently in many people’s feeds than I realized.

As for me personally and joking aside, I’m looking for a real relationship and a long term match. Nature and the planet are important. Musk is doing a lot of good in that regard. I’d rather find out sooner than later that someone doesn’t share that view of the world.

I went through same as you four years ago, before pedo-guy, Trudeau = Hitler, anti-boner Gates, imagining Bernie dead, etc. etc. etc. ETC.

Plus, after a January dinner date in freezing cold Montreal, coming back to a warm Tesla went a long way to a positive impression!

Better outcome that's going strong today, I'm happy to say (she even eventually asked me to add some TSLA to her retirement portfolio!) She also liked his human, atypical-billionaire side highlighted on SNL.

I wish you a happy outcome!

 

[insaneoctane]

If there is indeed a settlement, the options activity for next week sure seems like someone knew of an incoming settlement. If you go and look at the options volume today, things get even more interesting. By far, the most volume on 350 Calls for next week.

It also makes the stock action weakness on Thurs/Fri that much more suspect.

I'd be so outta character for WS to capitalize on an inside leak/tip and manipulate the SP to make some extra cash from that info. Only criminals and unethical types would do that

 

[insaneoctane]

Understand Chinese

found a lurker

https://twitter.com/x/status/1574391699769815040

I miss twitter, because I lost my password for my fake account with old yahoo email

Can someone translate from Cantonese to Clowninese?

 

[wipster]

We could see something like Xiaomi's CyberOne, which almost seems like it was launched entirely to preempt Optimus

Would have been way cooler if CyberOne had taken the selfie...

 

[MountainRatMat]

Wait, isn't it the opposite? With inflation people earn more and pay more taxes so there are more dollars in the treasury used to pay off the debt that was originated at a time of fewer, more-valuable dollars? So the debt gets easier to service after more inflation?

Nope, with $30 trillion of debt a few percentage point increase in interest rates makes the payments much larger.

To put it in terms that are easier to understand:

$300,000 home loan in 2020 at 2% costs $1109 per month
$300,000 home loan today at 6.5% costs $1896 per month

A difference of almost $300,000 in total paid over the life of the loan

 

[Discoducky]

I agree with the gist of your point - that we could be doing this at a less drastic pace. I disagree that .25 at a time would have done the trick as the mountain is just too high - even starting a year ago we'd be at 1.5 right now (6 meetings a year I believe). But yeah - the less drastic raises could have / should have started a year or year and a half ago, and we wouldn't need to be running this big experiment. Its almost like the Fed also forgot that 0% rates aren't the norm.

The other germane thought, and this is one I agree with the Fed on - price increases of all kinds are sticky. Its hard to get employees to take a wage cut, and its easy for businesses to maintain prices they're already charging. This is a good reason to go after the inflation hard before it settles in - don't let it get comfortable as it were.

I haven't studied it closely but an idea I've read consistently about 70s and 80s is that inflation wasn't tackled aggressively or consistently enough. There would be a hint of, finally, recovery and the Fed would let up a bit. For years. The eventual pain necessary was even higher as a result.


All that being said, I see this macro situation as being paint ball splash on TSLA, and it will turn out effectively irrelevant to Tesla. Demand so far exceeds supply that Tesla can see some actual demand destruction and still need to be growing the business just as fast to satisfy the current demand and be ready for future demand. If 1 year queues shrink to 6 months, they're still too long to gain access to the big chunk of the car market that needs a car pretty quickly between identifying the need, and satisfying the need.

On top of which - the households that Tesla sells to are less affected by inflation and interest rates.

My own take is that this is all noise and irrelevant to my long term buy and hold outlook.


I expect, and from what I've seen from the Fed, all of the bonds won't be removed. Not even close. Simplistic order of magnitude - something like $3T balance sheet at the start of the pandemic, $9T now, with a QT goal to shrink down to $6T. The balance sheet is going to be a lot bigger even if it all goes swimmingly.

Which for me is just fine. I think the balance sheet / government spending was too low before the pandemic (0% sustained interest rates and inflation being the primary evidence), so the pandemic has cured that problem We got too much of a correction though and the evidence is in the inflation rate.

Without going into technical details / nuances (and that I am 100% confident I'd get wrong in important ways), and agreeing that I'm not an economist, I do agree with the idea from modern monetary theory that the constraint on government spending comes from the inflation rate, not from bankruptcy or something else. In particular the sovereign issuer of a currency can never go bankrupt in its own currency - it just issues more. Too much issuance can degrade confidence in the sovereign and its currency, but that is an inflation constraint - not a bankruptcy constraint. Our state and local governments - they face the household constraint of bankruptcy as none of us can issue our own currency to satisfy our debts.

Great post and to be clear, the Fed is QT'ing bonds and 'other' securities (like mortgage backed securities). I'm hoping that they offload all the bonds and by doing that would demonstrate that they want to not blow up the housing market as (unfortunately) folks are going to start losing their jobs, mortgage defaults will go up and these mortgage backed securities will hugely decline in value...get my drift...

However, as the fed rate goes up, Tesla is best suited to handle the weakening demand for loans as Tesla's demand, backlog and net revenues are highest in the industry. I can imagine that the higher interest rates are going to hurt legacy OEMs (whose only profit is from their finance arm) the most and it might be a mortal wound in just a few quarters.

 

[elasalle]

Would have been way cooler if CyberOne had taken the selfie...

Even more cooler if name did not start with Cyber ... , if you can't even come up with a name, how hard to come up with new ideas ... must all be waiting for AI II, for next set of ideas ..

 

[betstarship]

This is potentially dumb to write out, but I am pretty sure Tesla reaches $450-$500 over the next 5 months

 

[Your Mom]

This is potentially dumb to write out, but I am pretty sure Tesla reaches $450-$500 over the next 5 months

What’s your reasoning? I feel like we’re gonna be stuck under 300 for years. I think 2020s will be a bad decade for stocks.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

If there is indeed a settlement, the options activity for next week sure seems like someone knew of an incoming settlement. If you go and look at the options volume today, things get even more interesting. By far, the most volume on 350 Calls for next week.

It also makes the stock action weakness on Thurs/Fri that much more suspect.

Sometimes I think you don't even listen to yourself. Earnings are coming. PE is going to be 82. Then 62.

People can add.

You don't think there are monied interests who understand we shouldn't be at $825 three weeks before earnings? I would imagine we'll see similar spikes on the expirations 10/21 and onward.