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

[KSilver2000]

The yield forces at play today are a long-term thing - fear of recession in 22 months (or some crazy rule).
So then does TSLA and market just keep dropping? 200?

When to buy more? I do have some powder left.

I’d say that depends on your investment timeline/strategy. Do you look to hold for few days? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? 5 years? 10 years? Longer?

Besides my long core position, I have fund for trading shares held for at most a week. I bought some at $220 today and plan to buy more if it reaches $210 by EOD Friday. My last transactions were a purchase at $228 and sell at $235 last week.

 

[hobbes]

Seems when the market rises, Tesla rises more. Then the same exaggeration going down (now).

Are there forces on each side that plan on this and causing it? Like Shorts wait for a market drop and hit Tesla especially hard - for the full effect while they conjure up a stupid FUD story). Bulls doing the same on the up days. This yield inversion today has nothing to do with Tesla, yet it gets hit 2x or 3x.

Or is it that it's just so popular a stock that the swings are amplified on plain crowd mentality?

I think in finance this is described by the beta coefficient:
"A beta greater than 1 generally means that the asset both is volatile and tends to move up and down with the market. An example is a stock in a big technology company."
Beta (finance) - Wikipedia

Has been this way as long as I remember. But I am not an expert in this field, maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

 

[jerry33]

People often say we're going to start a Trade War. Aren't we in it now or is there some financial definition that wasn't met yet?

As long as that person can say "we're still negotiating", it can be said we haven't yet started a trade war.

 

[Doggydogworld]

View attachment 441639
This chart has me keener than ever. Those dots just line up too nicely and can only mean one thing: growth = profits. As the cost of goods sold falls, the last shred of doubt vanishes and the big pile in on this stock will be signalled. Looking forward to the next two orange dots spelling it out.

Don't be misled by this chart:

1. He fudged numbers to get his points on/near the line. His Q2 2018 cost is ~15% too high (e.g. he shows -10% gm but Tesla said it was positive).

2. Wright's law doesn't apply to data points before Q3 2018 because Tesla ran ridiculously low utilization rates. Nobody does that for entire quarters (and Tesla never will again).

3. Cost reduction from Q3 2018 to present is a bit over 3000/car. Half of that is mix shift, e.g. half the cars have 1100 fewer 2170s now. That's not learning curve, just a cheaper variant.​

Since (finally) hitting full utilization in Q3 2018 Tesla shows a mix-adjusted 2-3% cost reduction per doubling. His 15% is a fantasy.

• S&P listing: (yes I know, the 3rd rail around here, but there are 2 points to make)
  • Tesla buys Panasonic's N.American operations to become GAAP profitable
    • Tesla gets a 1-yr boost in GAAP profits by declaring GF1 income w/o exps

​

You need to disabuse yourself of this notion that Tesla can count an acquired company's revenue and not the expenses. That's be blatant fraud.

 

[Fact Checking]

I honestly feel like IPOing is going to bankrupt them. My guess is that there was pressure to IPO because the orignal engineering team had 10 years on their option grants but had no way to get cash for it. But now that they are a public company the ability to raise money on hopes and dreams is far more difficult if they have nothing to show for it. The stock price is only going to continue to drop unless they raise the price enough to make a profit or if they show a breakthrough in autonomous tech or something. Why would you give this company your money?

Yeah, as I argued back in April, Uber is still a broken company today, with no viable business plan:

Lyft/Uber are true cash burning operations: they are only growing because they are loss-leading against taxi companies. The problem is that anyone who can write an app and has money to burn can compete with Lyft/Uber, including existing taxi companies. There's literally zero competitive advantage in their business models and both the Lyft and the Uber valuations are ridiculous. The usual economies of scale simply don't exist for taxi companies, because you cannot scale human drivers in the Lyft/Uber business model. This is why we haven't seen big international taxi companies for 100 years - unlike many other businesses there's no big advantage for taxi companies to go global.

So I fully agree with @neroden that both Lyft and Uber are broken companies as long as they don't have functional, driver-less FSD cars.

AFAICS only FSD could possibly save Uber - but they are hopelessly behind: they don't have an FSD chip, no FSD data stream from a half a million cars large fleet, nor do they have FSD manufacturing capacity.

Not advice.

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

The results from your experiment are not applicable to Porsche Taycan or any other car which has brake pedal regen.

I don't understand why so many here talk like Taycan has no regen whatsoever. Equally misguided is "Porsche thinks their drivers are too dumb for one-pedal". C'mon folks. If you like regen exclusively on the accel pedal, that's great. But why say dumb things when discussing other systems?

For some reason Porsche feels regen on the accelerator pedal won't pass muster with their fanatical core enthusiasts, who are deeply into race track tricks like heel-and-toe braking. 98% of Porsche buyers probably don't even know what heel-and-toe is, of course, much less how to do it. But if the cognoscenti don't bless a new model then the sheep won't buy it. So Porsche is gonna do Porsche things, mostly for reason that make no sense to Tesla fans.

As for efficiency, there are good reasons hypermilers go to great lengths to avoid regen whenever possible and fanatically seek out opportunities to coast. Of course they avoid friction braking, too.

This will all be academic in a few months, anyway, since you'll all be napping while your Teslas deploy optimal regen for you.

Correct.
Regen on accelerator, like Tesla deploys, makes it very hard to absolutely nail trail-braking on the apex. Now, this is something that matters on GT3/GT4 and other Caymans/911, not Taycan. Anyhow, it's probably 0.1% of customers that can claim such precision that it matters. I wouldn't claim such precision even after 10 years of participating in driving events.

Anyhow, at least there is a theoretical reason for this decision. But I'm also sure big part of decision was Porsche stubbornness, 'not invented here' syndrome, and unwillingness to recognize that Tesla's approach is better for more driving situations.

 

[Buckminster]

M3 shipping to Korea and Aussy.
Tesla launches Model 3 in South Korea for as low as ~$26,000 with incentives - Electrek

11th Aug
#Tesla registered 25,569 new #Model3 VINs. ~48% estimated to be dual motor. ~39% estimated to be International. Highest VIN is 520557.

It's all going rather splendidly.

 

[Causalien]

OT

Alibaba owns Aliexpress, which ships from China all over the world. I use it with some frequency but in places where amazon doesn't exist/has small marketshare they do quite well. Such as eastern europe, the middle east, africa etc. The prices and product range on Alibaba would give Amazon a run for its money. The only failure is delivery time which can be more than 3 weeks. Amazons not going anywhere because all the infrastructure then invested in, but Alibaba services far more than China. Not to mention they are also the producer of movies like Star Trek movies, Mission Impossible movies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Alibaba Pictures - Wikipedia

Ya pretty impressed how Alibaba evolved over the years. Started as a gateway for connecting Chinese manufacturers and designers in the west who white labels stuff and resale. Chinese companies tend to evolve into these huge conglomerates as they buy up tech startups and incubate under their wings. Sometimes good combinations come out. Stuff like food delivery in ride hailing apps eventually got copied by uber as well.

There are good and bad with the way they treat patents. We won't see the big autos buying out battery patents just to shelf and kill EV in China for example.

 

[Artful Dodger]

You need to disabuse yourself of this notion that Tesla can count an acquired company's revenue and not the expenses. That's be blatant fraud.

Yeah, me and Forbes.com You should definately correct their article:

Merger Mania Fueled By Accounting Rules That Can Make A Bad Deal Look Good

"Incredibly, postacquisition adjustments allowed by generally accepted accounting principles enable acquirers to rebook revenue the acquired company has already reported."
​

Here's some homework for you: find out why Daimler merged with Chrysler, then split again a year later. Then find out why Compaq and Hewlett-Packard pulled the same merger stunt. Why are Viacom and CBS merging (again!) right now? Hint: it's an accounting scam.

I thought you knew all these counting tricks. Aren't you the Count?

 

[JRP3]

American immigrant founder. From a "sh-thole country," according to our President.

Send him back! #MAGA

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

Try an experiment - do a drive with low regen and again with standard regen. Compare the Wh/mi for both trips. It's not about efficiency, it's about whether to capture some of the energy from slowing down in your battery or let it all waste away as heat.

I see SilentL's mis-reading of my replies has convinced everyone that I'm against regen braking (I'm not). Please go back to my original reply to him to get the context.

Oh, and I've already done that experiment before (not with the Tesla, since the friction brakes are used more in low regen, so it isn't a good test).

I have a 2016 leaf - no 1-pedal driving as regen's tied to the brake pedal, like the taycan. The leaf has a b-mode that provides a light regen similar to Tesla's low-regen setting. The b-mode is actually LESS efficient than the no-regen mode. Why? Because as a human, my pedal application is imprecise. I lift the throttle with the intention to stop accelerating, NOT to decelerate. So on the highway, I'm constantly re-accelerating because I can't find that sweet spot where there's no regen, but no accel as well. So in the leaf, I drive most efficiently in no-regen mode.

The narrow "neutral" power band on the model 3 engages regen more readily in standard regen mode. Even after practicing for 18-months, I still can't maintain the sweet spot for most of the commute - instead constantly shifting between regen and re-accel.

Although you all seem to agree that coasting is more efficient than regen on flat highways or low rolling roads, you think that those two scenarios are too few to justify my statement. What you're missing is that those two situations make up most of the commuting miles driven! So they factor more significantly in your overall driving efficiency than you think.

All of you who think Porsche is dumb in preferring coasting over regen, aren't accounting for how humans drive. And those who think there's a physical sensation difference when regen switches to friction brakes haven't tried the leaf's current programming. It's practically seamless and produces the best efficiency on my commute.

Sorry for the OT posting, but i'm seeing too many who think Tesla's regen mode is the best way to drive for both comfort AND efficiency, without seriously accounting for how people actually drive. It's all a trade-off!

 

[scaesare]

The problem with range is that it's not free. Perhaps one day with Maxwell's magic dry diode plus an ease of mining materials can yield us very low cost range increase, the current state is that it's very costly to increase range. You have to add more weight to the car, reduce margins, increase price, and reduce production in a cell limited world.

In direct contradiction to your assertion, the most recent range increase on the Model S "Raven" did not incur more cell weight, count, nor cost.

I understand that there is only so much additional efficiency once can squeeze out of an EV drivetrain and chassis, but wanted to point out that your scenario is not the only way to increase range.

In addition, you state "Perhaps one day with Maxwell's magic dry diode plus an ease of mining materials can yield us very low cost range increase..." as if you know that cost of a Maxwell-process battery is going to be greater than that of one made using the existing process. It's instead possible that a Maxwell battery may be cheaper than today's cells. That's often the case with advances in manufacturing processes. It may even be such that a larger capacity battery will cost less to produce than today.

That having been said, there are a number of perfectly valid scenarios where adding additional battery capacity is desirable for vehicles… 200+ is not the holy grail for all needs. Nor is 370.

 

[SpaceCash]

I just bought more shares. Executed at $220

I will be buying more shares EVERY two weeks until I reach a certain # of shares I set as a goal to achieve by July 2020.
Once I accumulate my goal, or when July 2020 arrives, I will do a post charting the full details of every purchase I made and fill you in with lots of personal anecdotes and stories.

Honestly I've never been more excited for the company or thought it SO obvious that Tesla is gonna become just an absolute monolith.

 

[ZeApelido]

I see SilentL's mis-reading of my replies has convinced everyone that I'm against regen braking (I'm not). Please go back to my original reply to him to get the context.

Oh, and I've already done that experiment before (not with the Tesla, since the friction brakes are used more in low regen, so it isn't a good test).

I have a 2016 leaf - no 1-pedal driving as regen's tied to the brake pedal, like the taycan. The leaf has a b-mode that provides a light regen similar to Tesla's low-regen setting. The b-mode is actually LESS efficient than the no-regen mode. Why? Because as a human, my pedal application is imprecise. I lift the throttle with the intention to stop accelerating, NOT to decelerate. So on the highway, I'm constantly re-accelerating because I can't find that sweet spot where there's no regen, but no accel as well. So in the leaf, I drive most efficiently in no-regen mode.

The narrow "neutral" power band on the model 3 engages regen more readily in standard regen mode. Even after practicing for 18-months, I still can't maintain the sweet spot for most of the commute - instead constantly shifting between regen and re-accel.

Although you all seem to agree that coasting is more efficient than regen on flat highways or low rolling roads, you think that those two scenarios are too few to justify my statement. What you're missing is that those two situations make up most of the commuting miles driven! So they factor more significantly in your overall driving efficiency than you think.

All of you who think Porsche is dumb in preferring coasting over regen, aren't accounting for how humans drive. And those who think there's a physical sensation difference when regen switches to friction brakes haven't tried the leaf's current programming. It's practically seamless and produces the best efficiency on my commute.

Sorry for the OT posting, but i'm seeing too many who think Tesla's regen mode is the best way to drive for both comfort AND efficiency, without seriously accounting for how people actually drive. It's all a trade-off!

Ignore efficiency for a moment. Whether or not you are perfectly coasting or have slight regen/acceleration variation is really inconsequential.

From a performance perspective (if you engage in a little more aggressive driving from time-to-time), 1 pedal accel/regen is vastly superior. The precision and low latency at which I can control my car's position and velocity is exquisite.

Regen on the brake pedal is just like any other car experience, which is crap and feels like driving something out of control.

 

[ZeApelido]

BTW, PSA on Evaluating How Good a Driver Are You?

If you are using high regen, then 99% of the time you shouldn't be touching the brake pedal over 10 mph. Every time you need to hit the brake pedal above 10 mph, you lose one point.

 

[humbaba]

BTW, PSA on Evaluating How Good a Driver Are You?

If you are using high regen, then 99% of the time you shouldn't be touching the brake pedal over 10 mph. Every time you need to hit the brake pedal above 10 mph, you lose one point.

yeah, i just had an annoying unnecessary braking. I twiddle with follow distance* and forgot to set it back to 4 or more so it followed too close and I ended up hitting the brakes before I remembered I needed to restore the follow.

* I like 4 or more in general, but in heavier traffic I reduce to 1 so as to be cut off less. In a way I don't really care about being cut off, but people increase risky behavior if they think they can get ahead...

 

[Prunesquallor]

Galloping coconuts for me

I’m thinking huge, steampunkesqe tank treads.

 

[Vines]

On topic, looks like cheap buying opportunities ahead lol! Closed deep in the red today, following the market.

First mine was a short term investment, playing the swing...now i'm long lol. Bagholder logic

 

[Doggydogworld]

Yeah, me and Forbes.com You should definately correct their article:

Merger Mania Fueled By Accounting Rules That Can Make A Bad Deal Look Good

"Incredibly, postacquisition adjustments allowed by generally accepted accounting principles enable acquirers to rebook revenue the acquired company has already reported."
​

Here's some homework for you: find out why Daimler merged with Chrysler, then split again a year later. Then find out why Compaq and Hewlett-Packard pulled the same merger stunt. Why are Viacom and CBS merging (again!) right now? Hint: it's an accounting scam.

I thought you knew all these counting tricks. Aren't you the Count?

In the case he describes:

1. Shaw reported revenue they shouldn't have, due to fraud or incompetence
2. CBW overpaid for Shaw, based partly on this overbooked revenue
3. CBW had to admit they overpaid, by reducing value of the contracts and increasing goodwill​

CBW didn't ever get to "rebook revenue" because the contracts never paid in full. Revenue they did book very definitely came with expenses attached.

Could an acquirer like CBW write down contracts way too much, then later rebook revenue? Maybe, but to do so intentionally would be clear fraud. Even if done "accidentally" my guess is they'd have to restate prior results instead of just rebooking revenue. And even if I'm wrong about that, rebooked revenue would come with expenses attached so there is no "1 year boost to GAAP profits by declaring income w/o expenses".

Finally, none of this applies to GF1 because Panasonic doesn't even use percentage of completion accounting.

Oh, and Daimler owned Chrysler for 9 years, not 1. It was a disaster on multiple levels which had nothing to do with accounting.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

When do we know which institutions have accumulated or sold stock? I’m curious to know if there really was a big fund or other investor buying over the last few weeks. Isn’t it somewhere in August that these numbers get published?