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

[EVDRVN]

My understanding is that it is very hard and very expensive to get in the insurance business. Every state has a mountain of regulations, so you need a few lawyers for each state. Once in, of course, it's a print money machine.

I know they have been working with ins companies for some time to do a packaged insurance deal or Tesla only deal with some large companies but I don't know where that ever went.

 

[EVDRVN]

Look at the VIN registrations lately. It's like 80% RWD. Since LR only comes in AWD/P we know that those 80% RWD are all SR+ Model 3s.

LR has 78KWh. SR+ has 54KWh. Do the math. There's enough bty cells to make 7K Model 3s per week. That's 350K in the next 12 months.

Further, add 80K S/X per guidance, and China needs to make only 70K from start of production to 2020Q2. That's about 23 weeks of production. So if GF3/Shanghai is producing Model 3s by about Nov, then the numbers add up to 500K total in the next 12 months.

A friend of mine was frustrated with all the new changes and they offered here an inventory LR RWD car. Perhaps they are moving those to people that wanted RWD LR at a lower cost but had not yet ordered. The price was very good comparatively,

 

[Carl Raymond]

it would be nice to see an actual profit at some point on this company.

Revenue. Margin. Growth. Cash flow roughly neutral or positive. As a long long, those are what I want to see. Profit - don’t care about that till years from now. If they show a large profit now they failed to spend enough on growth.

Lol if the install equipment isn't operational then you're not at 35 gwh capacity! That's a pretty big "However"

Capacity not equals output. I’m capable of 30 sit-ups. Most days I do zero.

 

[Hock1]

Revenue. Margin. Growth. Cash flow roughly neutral or positive. As a long long, those are what I want to see. Profit - don’t care about that till years from now. If they show a large profit now they failed to spend enough on growth.



Capacity not equals output. I’m capable of 30 sit-ups. Most days I do zero.

Yes. Pretty simple: Capacity vis-a-vis capacity utilization.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Revenue. Margin. Growth. Cash flow roughly neutral or positive. As a long long, those are what I want to see. Profit - don’t care about that till years from now. If they show a large profit now they failed to spend enough on growth.

Fingers to temples. “See Amazon....Be Amazon...”

 

[ZsoZso]

This is why cats typically don’t enjoy car rides; they are well aware of the dangers.

Plus, they know they can’t trust their idiot human pets to drive properly

 

[Pras]

Any theories on TRowPrice’s selling their near 10% stake?

I think they used the run up in Q4 to liquidate (someone alluded to that mysterious fall from high 300s to 295.)

Reason could be many but could be that they decided to sell right after the SEC lawsuit and may have waited for the right opportunity. Thoughts?

 

[ZsoZso]

T Rowe dumped more shares, almost 90% of shares since Q3 to Q1. They had like 12,000,000 shares in Q3. Only holding 900k now. Wonder who else dumped

That is actually very good news! That means they have only 10% left, so only an extra 10% of the time period of suffering for us investors until they complete their dump* If they were selling for ~6 months, then only a few more weeks left at the same rate until they are empty.

After that the nightmare period is over and the SP can resume its natural rising tendency. Finally, we will be able to say good riddance to them.

*

Spoiler

Boy that was a long and painful dump... ouch

 

[Unpilot]

We should be looking at ourselves as pioneers in long march toward the AI and Renewable energy.

Tesla sees everyone one of us as a contributing member of that movement.

Each of us got what we got, when we got it, and we were willing to pay the price at that time.

In the grand scheme, $3000 price flucations, negativity from the always-gets-it-wrong press, and grousing from owners about whether they did or didn't get treated quite as well as the would have liked while being delivered the most advanced, stylish, and important technology on the face of the earth for a price 1/10th it's actual value will quickly be forgotten.

Nice first post...welcome!

 

[elasalle]

.

Any theories on TRowPrice’s selling their near 10% stake?

I think they used the run up in Q4 to liquidate (someone alluded to that mysterious fall from high 300s to 295.)

Reason could be many but could be that they decided to sell right after the SEC lawsuit and may have waited for the right opportunity. Thoughts?

Dec was bad month overall (See S&P drop from 13th to 26th) - lots of recession fears etc as well. Then Fed announced sometime later that they would not be another rate hike as well, and market regained only after that.
So that should also be factored in ... cheers!!

 

[bdy0627]

That's very pessimistic. Panasonic just said they installed 35 GWh/year capacity by end of March 31. Even if they were at ~24 GWh in Q1 they'll work hard to at least get closer to 35 GWh. Panasonic actually has more to lose if they endanger their exclusive partnership with Tesla.

So let's assume they get from 24 GWh to close to 35 GWh in say 6 months. That already increases the LR output from 5k/week to 7.3k/week - with SR packs it's up to 10.7k/week - with a 50%/50% mix it's around 8.5k/week.

Plus in China they might choose another cell supplier.

We need to keep in mind the expected production rates Tesla has told us they expect to achieve this year. They haven't been anywhere near these rates on a sustained basis. We don't know the current production limit in Freemont, but it will take some number of months to ramp up further. This is what Tesla told us in the Q4 ER:

"In our Fremont facility, we are now past the steep portion of the production S-curve, and we expect our production rate to continue to gradually improve. Every part of the Model 3 production process has demonstrated over a 24-hour period the ability to produce at an extrapolated rate of 7,000 vehicles per week. By the end of this year, we expect to be able to produce Model 3 at this rate on a sustained basis."

• so gradual improvement up to sustained 7,000/week by the end of the year (that will very likely not be the average rate for any quarter in 2019)

"by the end of this year we are expecting to start producing Model 3 vehicles at our Gigafactory Shanghai using a complete vehicle production line. "

• so they expect to "start" producing vehicles in Shanghai by the end of this year. We should not expect them to average anywhere near 3,000 per week out of Shanghai this year.

 

[SO16]

And that would differ from the shorts' take on tweets from Elon because...

It isn’t different.

 

[BornToFly]

Wow! Tesla just published a report that is a smack down on every piece of FUD that has come out in the last 5 years, ranging from safety at the factory, to recycling the batteries, to accident rates, to mining of minerals, etc. Let's see if this gets positive coverage from the "media."
Tesla Impact Report 2019 | Solar Power | Electric Car

 

[BornToFly]

Any theories on TRowPrice’s selling their near 10% stake?

I think they used the run up in Q4 to liquidate (someone alluded to that mysterious fall from high 300s to 295.)

Reason could be many but could be that they decided to sell right after the SEC lawsuit and may have waited for the right opportunity. Thoughts?

I don't get it. If they bought those shares back, they would help create a short squeeze that would result in excellent profits for them. But I'm not too surprised. My employer has our 401K with them, and my return over the last 13 years is only in the single digits, so they seem to be managed by morons.

 

[Prunesquallor]

Wow! Tesla just published a report that is a smack down on every piece of FUD that has come out in the last 5 years, ranging from safety at the factory, to recycling the batteries, to accident rates, to mining of minerals, etc. Let's see if this gets positive coverage from the "media."
Tesla Impact Report 2019 | Solar Power | Electric Car

Why is this locked behind scribd? Why wouldn’t Tesla make this open on their website?

Edit: I take it back it’s there.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf

 

[mblakele]

Wow! Tesla just published a report that is a smack down on every piece of FUD that has come out in the last 5 years, ranging from safety at the factory, to recycling the batteries, to accident rates, to mining of minerals, etc. Let's see if this gets positive coverage from the "media."
Tesla Impact Report 2019 | Solar Power | Electric Car

Original: Sustainable Products and Manufacturing

https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf

 

[Pras]

.


Dec was bad month overall (See S&P drop from 13th to 26th) - lots of recession fears etc as well. Then Fed announced sometime later that they would not be another rate hike as well, and market regained only after that.
So that should also be factored in ... cheers!!

The sell-off happened both in Q4 and Q1. I guess first (December) was the macro driven and the second sell off was aligned / triggered when Elon sent that email about 7% layoff and profit margin slowing. Could be a risk aversion move by the fund.

 

[SPadival]

Ugh, I went wandering around the comments on that article and trod in something familiar, but unpleasant...

It's your old mate, Donn, @winfield100

View attachment 397103

Please address him with the proper self selected honorific - Sir Beach Bum Bailey @beachbum77 - BBB for short

 

[Prunesquallor]

Dammit, now I’M getting that prostate ad! When I cancel it, Google answers “we’ll TRY to block that ad”. (Emphasis mine. I gotta go pee).

 

[AlexS]

not sure if it was posted. but Real Vision have another Tesla Short episode. Basically the guy is betting that demand is gone. And he says reducing sales team is a problem for demand. He will reverse his mind if he will see sustainable demand. Seems reasonable guy though.