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

[Krugerrand]

OT:

I'm at Iceland Airwaves right now. Mega concert series in Reykjavík - I usually attend 80 or so in a matter of days. I encounter some friends at the front row at Gaukurinn before KÚL starts and we start chatting about what we've seen so far. I pull out my phone to show some pictures, and a friend makes a weird face.

Her: "Why do you have an app with a picture of a uterus on it?"

Me: "..."

View attachment 473828

So, she’s no longer your friend. Right?

 

[Artful Dodger]

Now here's a mind-blower that will make you never want to day trade again: The performance for the S&P 500 cumulatively during market hours (open to close) since 1993 is actually negative! That's right, all the gains and then some, cumulatively speaking, happen between the market close and the next market open! Here are the details of a recent study of S&P 500 gains:

The Stock Market Works by Day, but It Loves the Night

By day trading, and not holding the shares overnight, you are stacking the odds against yourself!

Well, unfortunately that theory doesn't hold for TSLA, at least not over the past 1,134 trading days (my data only goes back to May 7, 2015 when I started tracking TSLA).

Below, I use that data to count the total number of days which did better Overnight vs Intraday (Opening SP - Previous Close) > (Closing SP - Opening SP) = 1 as follows:

As you can see, the 'Overnight' holders did ever so slightly worse than the 'Intraday' traders, with 49.56% outperformering days. This is almost exactly what you would expect from a random sample of that size (data available upon request via PM).

Conclusion: there is no treatment effect. Hypothesis is not supported by the sample data. Not to say this doesn't hold for the S&P 500 over the long term, but it does show that TSLA is being treated differently by the Market, at least over the past 4.5 years:

Make sense? We just broke above the 5-year high range on Oct 24 (and the Shortzies are still deep in denial, spending like drunken sailors to stop the tide...)

Me? I'm hodling.

Cheers!

 

[Krugerrand]

Nah, Aquarius

You need a Sagittarius in your life to keep your head screwed on right.

 

[Krugerrand]

If Tesla open up pre order of the truck before the actual reveal event, just like model 3, but online.
How many people would put down 1k, sight unseen, for a spot in the line?

I’m already in line even though the line hasn’t started yet. They had me at cyber. Lost my mind when they said personal armored vehicle because, you know: zombie apocalypse.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Anyone know how to say “how about them apples” in Chinese??

Oh that one's easy:

"Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin." ​

 

[dc_h]

What CATL battery agreement? Do you mean the Bloomberg story from yesterday? That's reporting on an old story from the Summer, there is no 'agreement' just and 'understanding', and why did Bloomberg chose to report this yesterday as if it was news? Its more disinformation from a reliable source of FUD.

It appears to be an update from the earlier story based on Elon meeting the CATL CEO in august. I don’t see any downside in the article, so don’t understand the FUD angle.

 

[Artful Dodger]

OT:

100 years ago today, on November 6, 1919, Arthur Eddington gave a presentation about a solar eclipse that confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, immediately turning Einstein into a:

1. genius
2. uber-nerd
3. legend
4. all of the above

Thought you should know.

Cheers!

 

[JustMe]

International shipments update...

The Tesla shipments data I've plotted below comes from the hard work of Franco Mossotto and friends: Franco Mossotto on Twitter

So there was a tempest in a teapot of sorts about unexplained delays of two RoRo ships this week. But in the end, everything still looks to be on track. The plot below is an update of the one I posted a few days ago. So far, five shipments have been delivered, five ships are currently underway (shaded) to Europe (3) and China (2). The Asian Dynasty has bellied up to the docks and will be loading over the next few days. Two more ships are on the schedule to be loaded. These last three ships mark the three blue points on the Q4 line where they would plot if they receive average total loading days. We don't know when the last ship will load this Q, but if they follow previous Q schedules, we are looking at a major blowout in international deliveries. We are about to eclipse the Q3 total "vehicle loading days" for international deliveries. Based on European shipments/delivery totals, about 1,500 vehicles are loaded per day.
The following numbers are guesstimates. Use at your own risk

Bottom line: Q4 international deliveries are on pace to surpass Q3 by 7,000 - 30,000 vehicles.

If US production and deliveries hold with Q3 levels, that translates to 104 - 127k vehicles for Q4, which would result in 2019 deliveries of 359,000 - 382,000 vehicles. I wouldn't be against them missing their annual guidance at this point!

 

[StealthP3D]

Conclusion: there is no treatment effect. Hypothesis is not supported by the sample data. Not to say this doesn't hold for the S&P 500 over the long term, but it does show that TSLA is being treated differently by the Market, at least over the past 4.5 years:

Thanks for crunching the numbers for Tesla.

I just have one correction: The hypothesis was not that this rule could be applied to any individually traded stock, some will obviously have time periods when the gains flip from mostly during trading hours to between market sessions and vice-versa. Or an individual stock might have behavior opposite the expected behavior for long periods of time. But in the SPY (ETF that mirrors the S&P500), it was shown to be true, at least from the time period studied (1993-2018).

My only question is if there are anomalies in the ETF price each day that could cause this. The study really needs to be repeated with all the individual stocks in the S&P500 and other indexes. Or all publically traded stocks. As far as studies go, it would be relatively trivial to do. I'm not going to do it because I'm not a frequent trader but I would still be interested in the results. I time my buys to coincide with what I believe will be high growth periods of the share price of 1-6 years or more and don't count pennies when I enter and exit.

 

[Mike Smith]

Kimbal Musk on twitter today:

"I am most excited for the Cybertruck than any Tesla product since the Model S. It’s going to blow your mind"

Kimbal Musk on Twitter

 

[StealthP3D]

It appears to be an update from the earlier story based on Elon meeting the CATL CEO in august. I don’t see any downside in the article, so don’t understand the FUD angle.

Evidence appears to be mounting that Tesla is taking big steps to extend its vertical integration all the way to the cell manufacturing level. This regurgitated story appears to counter that bullish narrative when, in fact, it is an out-of-date story. Of course, Tesla might be planning on doing both with a battery supply agreement as a stop-gap measure to fill demand until they have enough in-house capacity.

It's the regurgitation of an old story, presented as timely, if the intention was to confuse or mislead people from forming opinions based on current developments, that make it FUD. And it presented the wrong facts (an understanding vs. a signed legal agreement).

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Kimbal Musk on twitter today:

"I am most excited for the Cybertruck than any Tesla product since the Model S. It’s going to blow your mind"

Kimbal Musk on Twitter

There's so much hype around this thing lol. It's hard to keep expectations in check

 

[wipster]

OT:

100 years ago today, on November 6, 1919, Arthur Eddington gave a presentation about a solar eclipse that confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, immediately turning Einstein into a:

1. genius
2. uber-nerd
3. legend
4. all of the above

Thought you should know.

Cheers!

He did it on my birthday before I was even born? Now that is foresight...

 

[Buckminster]

So LA Autoshow starts 22 Nov. Optimal date to release Pickup would therefore be ~20/11. 2 weeks notice to the launch party - invites go out ~6th Nov.

Elon is getting predictable - maybe the SP will become so also.

 

[mrdoubleb]

It could even be Tim Cook lamenting the fact that they didn't start thinking about developing EV's in 2003 like Musk and Straubel did (and who actually acted on it). This would highlight that Tesla has paid their auto-manufacturing dues by constantly developing EV's over the previous 12 years.

That's as close as I want to see Apple get to Tesla - lamenting what they didn't do.

Yeah. That's like MS lamenting about how they gave up their - believe it or not- once leading position in smartphones and got back in the game again way too late. I do not want to start a fan flame war, but I happened to love Windows Phone 7.8's design and the aesthetics of the Nokia Lumia 800. It was stunning and had some innovative features I still miss. MS also had billions in the bank to throw at it. In the end it didn't matter. They had world class harder from Nokia, innovative features, a gorgeous UI, but the app store issue, the sheer gravity of the Apple and Google stores sucking in all dev's like a black hole became a fatal Achilles heel.

Jump forward to Apple and Google trying to get I to the self driving electric car business. Obviously these companies are not without any potential to make it in this field, but Tesla's billions upon billions of miles and by that time millions of cars collecting real world data from all over the globe may be such a big advantage it would be impossible to catch up no matter how good your developers are and how much money you have.

And finally when it comes to manufacturing, as far I know Apple is more like a design house and they contract manufacturing to 3rd parties e.g. Foxconn. If there is anything we TSLA investors have learned is that going from hand built to 350k per year is far from trivial. Even when you hire people from the likes of Daimler, Ford or Mazda.

 

[mrdoubleb]

International shipments update...

The Tesla shipments data I've plotted below comes from the hard work of Franco Mossotto and friends: Franco Mossotto on Twitter

So there was a tempest in a teapot of sorts about unexplained delays of two RoRo ships this week. But in the end, everything still looks to be on track. The plot below is an update of the one I posted a few days ago. So far, five shipments have been delivered, five ships are currently underway (shaded) to Europe (3) and China (2). The Asian Dynasty has bellied up to the docks and will be loading over the next few days. Two more ships are on the schedule to be loaded. These last three ships mark the three blue points on the Q4 line where they would plot if they receive average total loading days. We don't know when the last ship will load this Q, but if they follow previous Q schedules, we are looking at a major blowout in international deliveries. We are about to eclipse the Q3 total "vehicle loading days" for international deliveries. Based on European shipments/delivery totals, about 1,500 vehicles are loaded per day.
The following numbers are guesstimates. Use at your own risk

Bottom line: Q4 international deliveries are on pace to surpass Q3 by 7,000 - 30,000 vehicles.

If US production and deliveries hold with Q3 levels, that translates to 104 - 127k vehicles for Q4, which would result in 2019 deliveries of 359,000 - 382,000 vehicles. I wouldn't be against them missing their annual guidance at this point!

View attachment 473984

This better be right as October Europe deliveries were only about 50% of July.

Obviously not worried about demand just execution... hate the year end scrambling with practically most of Europe being out for holidays the last two weeks of the year.

 

[Thekiwi]

Yeah. That's like MS lamenting about how they gave up their - believe it or not- once leading position in smartphones and got back in the game again way too late. I do not want to start a fan flame war, but I happened to love Windows Phone 7.8's design and the aesthetics of the Nokia Lumia 800. It was stunning and had some innovative features I still miss. MS also had billions in the bank to throw at it. In the end it didn't matter. They had world class harder from Nokia, innovative features, a gorgeous UI, but the app store issue, the sheer gravity of the Apple and Google stores sucking in all dev's like a black hole became a fatal Achilles heel.

Jump forward to Apple and Google trying to get I to the self driving electric car business. Obviously these companies are not without any potential to make it in this field, but Tesla's billions upon billions of miles and by that time millions of cars collecting real world data from all over the globe may be such a big advantage it would be impossible to catch up no matter how good your developers are and how much money you have.

And finally when it comes to manufacturing, as far I know Apple is more like a design house and they contract manufacturing to 3rd parties e.g. Foxconn. If there is anything we TSLA investors have learned is that going from hand built to 350k per year is far from trivial. Even when you hire people from the likes of Daimler, Ford or Mazda.

FYI: Apple designs and owns all the manufacturing equipment in the contract manufacturing centres (Foxconn is effectively a landlord and labour manager when it comes to Apple). It’s not cars of course, but it is several hundred million mobile devices a year.

 

[CorneliusXX]

Evidence appears to be mounting that Tesla is taking big steps to extend its vertical integration all the way to the cell manufacturing level. This regurgitated story appears to counter that bullish narrative when, in fact, it is an out-of-date story. Of course, Tesla might be planning on doing both with a battery supply agreement as a stop-gap measure to fill demand until they have enough in-house capacity.

It's the regurgitation of an old story, presented as timely, if the intention was to confuse or mislead people from forming opinions based on current developments, that make it FUD. And it presented the wrong facts (an understanding vs. a signed legal agreement).

I hope they do have cell supply agreements in place as a stop-gap measure. It will reinforce the continuation of the growth story.

It would be so easy for timelines to slide with the internal cell production project.

They'll need to align giant piles of raw materials being delivered just in time with a brand new production line integrating tech from several recent acquisitions, then iterate to get the yield up.

All that while needing ultra cautious testing as any flaw in their cells would have substantial costs and reputational damage.

It would be difficult for the company if vehicle manufacturing expansion and new product releases had to be delayed due to lack of cells.

I know that in time they will excel in cell production but it could be a bumpy ride along the way.

 

[CorneliusXX]

He did it on my birthday before I was even born? Now that is foresight...

Happy belated birthday!

 

[RobStark]

I hope they do have cell supply agreements in place as a stop-gap measure. It will reinforce the continuation of the growth story.

It would be so easy for timelines to slide with the internal cell production project.

They'll need to align giant piles of raw materials being delivered just in time with a brand new production line integrating tech from several recent acquisitions, then iterate to get the yield up.

All that while needing ultra cautious testing as any flaw in their cells would have substantial costs and reputational damage.

It would be difficult for the company if vehicle manufacturing expansion and new product releases had to be delayed due to lack of cells.

I know that in time they will excel in cell production but it could be a bumpy ride along the way.

They should really put the new cells in the Roadster First.

It will be a selling point. A "Pure" Tesla.

Then Model S and X.

Then everything.