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

[Nocturnal]

It really doesn't want to go below 380. That's awesome.

 

[StealthP3D]

OK, time to come clean...

I am an absolute idiot...in regard to some things. I have virtually no knowledge of many things that impact my life. I will say that I consider myself very knowledgeable in some regards, most of which no longer have any impact on my financial well being. Things like teaching music I can have a very in depth, knowledgeable discussion about. Stock however, is definitely not in my wheelhouse of enlightened perception.

A good friend of mine has been telling me how crazy I am to be involved in TSLA for a couple of years now. He is, unlike me, VERY well schooled in everything stock market. He follows the charts religiously. He looks at all the trends. He follows all of the best advice regarding his investments. He is glued to a company's "fundamentals" (I still don't really understand what that is precisely). In short, he is WAY out of my league when it comes to the financial markets. He is genuinely concerned for me that I am so invested in such a fraud that is lead by such a criminal as Elon. (Yes, those are his words.)

Shorting, hedging, puts, calls, charts, "Max Pain" (what the hell is that anyway?) This stuff is all Greek to me and I don't understand it one bit. So, why the hell do I own TSLA? Great question. Well, all I can say is this. I heard about the company back when it was just the Roadster and the Model S. I liked what they said they were trying to do. I could never afford their products, but were amazed by what they were capable of. I test drove a Model S. "OMG this thing is incredible!" They announced the Model 3. On a whim, I made a reservation just because it made me feel good. I bought a little stock. First time ever buying any stock of any kind. I had a two year wait before anything went final so I started doing some more research. "Who the hell are these people that call themselves TSLAQ?" "Is the company really a fraud?" "Is it all a lie?" Two years later I get the email...time to configure or cancel. By that time my little investment has earned enough for a sizable down payment. I go for it and sell my TSLA shares. Get the car...game over.

6 months into ownership and I have a little money to play with. I get back in. About a year later I have the opportunity to purchase some land for our dream retirement home. Yup, you see where I'm going. Made enough on TSLA for the purchase. I leave a small number of shares untouched. In the weeks since the land purchase the stock has skyrocketed and is making me more money. By the time my Cybertruck reservation (yeah, I jumped on that bandwagon too) comes to delivery, I hope to have made a chunck for another sizable down payment for it. TSLA has made it possible for me to have things I never would have been able to have without it.

So...my investment philosophy, coming from a guy that knows absolutely nothing about how the market works? Find a company you believe in. Check it out. Experience what they offer. Then, if it feels right and you have some discretionary funds...pull the trigger and then ride it out knowing you are supporting a company that makes sense for you. Yeah, you could lose everything, but if you know that is a possibility going in, it shouldn't hurt as bad if it all goes belly up. The upside?...well, for me it has been amazing!

My friend still knows WAY more than me about investing to make money. But, I don't think he gets what it feels like to be part of something you really believe in. He STILL thinks I am idiot for investing in Tesla. LOL!

Definitely, unequivocally, without a doubt NOT, IN ANY WAY an advice!
(feeling really happy about my little investment though)

So, would you say you belong to the Forrest Gump School of Investing?

A good friend of mine has been telling me how crazy I am to be involved in TSLA for a couple of years now. He is, unlike me, VERY well schooled in everything stock market. He follows the charts religiously. He looks at all the trends. He follows all of the best advice regarding his investments. He is glued to a company's "fundamentals" (I still don't really understand what that is precisely). In short, he is WAY out of my league when it comes to the financial markets. He is genuinely concerned for me that I am so invested in such a fraud that is lead by such a criminal as Elon. (Yes, those are his words.)

I gotta ask. Has he driven your Model 3 yet? Because from your description of how much stock market research he does, I would think he might have begged a test drive from you by now. Or that you would have forced him to try it out.

 

[KarenRei]

I haven't the foggiest idea what you are talking about here, but that's what I love about this place. It's highly unlikely to be BS, given the pedigree of the poster, but if it was BS then others with a similar pedigree will sort it out. I may borrow "my most recent project is an attempt to use differential evolution of fluids with an arrhenius equation database to try to evolve a hypercycle" for an upcoming Christmas party, many thanks.

• Differential evolution = genetic algorithm / artificial evolution / etc. Take your pick of terms. Basically "survival of the fittest". You have a population of possible solutions to a problem, they "breed" and "mutate", and if one is "fitter" than another it's being compared against, it "lives on" and the other "dies".
• Arrhenius equation = a popular formula for expressing reaction rate constants (the rate at which different possible chemical reactions can occur). The actual rate of the reaction is the reaction rate constant (from the Arrhenius equation) times the molar concentrations of its reactants, each to a given exponent. Or in plain English: "a database of how fast things react with each other"
• Hypercycle = a self-sustaining series of chemical reactions, which can recreate all of its component building blocks from common raw materials. The simplest form of life - not even a cell (no membrane) - just free-floating chemicals, reacting and creating more of each other. The first step in abiogenesis.

The basic algorithm I'm implementing is:

• Each member in the population (e.g. each set of experimental conditions) represents an "inflow" and a "starting cell", at a given (evolvable) temperature. Each inflow is initially randomly generated from a mix of common naturally occuring chemicals at realistic ratios to each other.
• The inflow is "relaxed" (allowed to react) for a given, randomly chosen, evolvable period of time
• The relaxed inflow is then allowed to react again for the same length of time it would take to pass through the chosen cell (another evolvable parameter). The output is saved (A).
• The cell itself is then "relaxed", with a given amount of its contents flowing out of the cell and being replaced by inflow, per unit time. The output is saved (B)
• In an ideal hypercycle scenario, (B) will look very different from (A); if they're the same, then the initial conditions in (B) made basically no difference (it just diluted until it became like (A)) - but the longer it takes for (B) to look like (A), the better of a job it did hanging on against dilution. Also, in an ideal scenario, the hypercycle will be able to handle high inflow rates without dissipating, as well as variation in the inflow. Lastly, in an ideal scenario, the contents of the inflow are as realistic as possible.
• The above parameters define the cost function (e.g. how "fit" a given experiment is). Those which do a better job replace those which did a poorer job.

I have no clue whether this approach will yield anything interesting, of course When the code is done I'll just stick it on my compute node and let it run for a few months.

Come on, isn't this sort of thing what everyone does in their spare time during the winter?

 

[Nocturnal]

My friend still knows WAY more than me about investing to make money. But, I don't think he gets what it feels like to be part of something you really believe in. He STILL thinks I am idiot for investing in Tesla. LOL!

Definitely, unequivocally, without a doubt NOT, IN ANY WAY an advice!
(feeling really happy about my little investment though)

Dan

Ask him if those things are guaranteed ways to invest, why are fund managers, the highest paid financial professionals with the best education possible and access to entire teams to research for them, unable to beat the market return in the long run?

If you want to be snarky, ask him if on average he has out performed the market (with proof) and why he hasn't retired

Come on, isn't this sort of thing what everyone does in their spare time during the winter?

I ate some edibles and watched cartoons so pretty similar.

 

[Todd Burch]

Yes, looks like a lot of support at $380, which is a good sign. Consolidate, then ATH in 44 minutes

 

[JRP3]

It really doesn't want to go below 380. That's awesome.

You had to say that...

 

[SpaceCash]

You had to say that...

We're still Kosher, chief

 

[Unpilot]

Indeed. Except that you're not doing gradient descent to train the neural net itself, but rather to choose an optimal neural net architecture. Meta-training.

Most of my work with optimization has been through the scipy.optimize libraries, which offer quite a selection of tools - although I've more recently been needing to do it in C++ to avoid having to implement python bindings. The scipy libraries are also annoyingly deficient in A) threading, and B) ability to resume - although you can work around (A) by doing threading inside your cost evaluation function, and (B) by cashing and saving the results of every cost evaluation, so that if you have to start over, it can just look up the answers up to the point where you left off.

Most of my previous optimization projects have been with CFD model optimization, although I've also used it for things like compression, and my most recent project is an attempt to use differential evolution of fluids with an arrhenius equation database to try to evolve a hypercycle

Was going to say the exact same thing

 

[shrspeedblade]

Hell, I'm just excited if this range is our springboard going into production #s and earnings in January!

(I'm encouraged we didn't see more of a drop when the EV credit news hit- like I needed yet one more reason to loathe trump!)

 

[neezer]

I'm surprised it's not dropping now that it's out that the EV subsidy extension for the 200K+ club failed to pass.

 

[Prunesquallor]

I haven't the foggiest idea what you are talking about here, but that's what I love about this place. It's highly unlikely to be BS, given the pedigree of the poster, but if it was BS then others with a similar pedigree will sort it out. I may borrow "my most recent project is an attempt to use differential evolution of fluids with an arrhenius equation database to try to evolve a hypercycle" for an upcoming Christmas party, many thanks.

Short OT anecdote.

I'm just a dumb aerospace engineer, but I peripherally interact with smart planetary geologists. At a Christmas party years ago I struck up a conversation with one who was investigating alternate K-T Boundary (dinosaur killer) hypotheses (the Chicxulub impact crater had just been discovered). I had just happened to skim a SciAm article on the subject that mentioned the "Deccan Traps" (ancient volcanic region in India). So, I threw out "Oh, so you're probably interested in the Deccan Traps." He was dumbfounded, as that was exactly what he was researching.

So, never underestimate the potential of throwing out a phrase to make you look smart (especially after the egg nog).

 

[kengchang]

Delivery ramping in the US

 

[UncaNed]

From September

Im curious if people are still so sure these would expire worthless.

How did you find this particular buy?

By randomly scanning the options chain?

Or was it just an anomaly in the Option Chain at that expiration where the premium was just crazy lower for that one strike price than the next higher or lower, or was the premium in line with others but certain Greeks made it a much better buy for some reason?

Thanks again. Wish I'd bought then, but you - and a few others posting here - motivated me to learn more about options.

 

[larmor]

I'm surprised it's not dropping now that it's out that the EV subsidy extension for the 200K+ club failed to pass.

The auto story for tesla for US customers is good now which i think is why there is little change on news of EV subsidy/credit. The main story is the market coming to realization of local Shanghai factory making M3 for local consumption, thus bypassing any trade talk...

The upcoming stories, which will remain without value by the market are FSD-- with its data (data is the new oil), solar rental thus bypassing local utilies, and that pesky 620 mile range truck (and of course super slick roadster with 620 mile range also)-- where is that 620 mile range coming from??!!!

 

[UncaNed]

Short OT anecdote.

I'm just a dumb aerospace engineer, but I peripherally interact with smart planetary geologists. At a Christmas party years ago I struck up a conversation with one who was investigating alternate K-T Boundary (dinosaur killer) hypotheses (the Chicxulub impact crater had just been discovered). I had just happened to skim a SciAm article on the subject that mentioned the "Deccan Traps" (ancient volcanic region in India). So, I threw out "Oh, so you're probably interested in the Deccan Traps." He was dumbfounded, as that was exactly what he was researching.

So, never underestimate the potential of throwing out a phrase to make you look smart (especially after the egg nog).

A Sci-Am story long ago about electric cars for grid storage sparked my first interest in electric vehicles (as Sci Am did on so many other interests), making it my favorite Christmas gift magazine.

Edit - added in parenthesis

 

[Prunesquallor]

The auto story for tesla for US customers is good now which i think is why there is little change on news of EV subsidy/credit. The main story is the market coming to realization of local Shanghai factory making M3 for local consumption, thus bypassing any trade talk...

The upcoming stories, which will remain without value by the market are FSD-- with its data (data is the new oil), solar rental thus bypassing local utilies, and that pesky 620 mile range truck (and of course super slick roadster with 620 mile range also)-- where is that 620 mile range coming from??!!!

And Giga Berlin. I like that one a lot.

 

[StealthP3D]

Robinhood and many other apps supports fraction shares now, so unit price is not a problem anymore.
Last I heard SP500 weight is based on share price, not market cap...
So, better not split to keep it higher, or, even a reverse split to hack the dis-functional system.

Edit:
What I remembered is apparently wrong:
What Does the S&P 500 Index Measure and How Is It Calculated?
SP500 is market cap weighted.

Unit price is not why I support a stock split (also, as you noted with your edit, your other reason against stock splitting is not valid).

Last time Tesla was at $380 the stock did not split. In fact, around that time didn't Musk say something like "We don't deserve a price this high"? So imagine the message it would send if Tesla, again at $380, announced a stock split. The effect of that alone might trigger the short squeeze of the century. Couple it with a great Q4 and the powder keg is lit!

Stock valuation is more about perception than any analyst will ever admit. And that holds most true on a company growing and innovating as quickly as Tesla.

 

[ZsoZso]

Just a heads-up on an excellent Twitter thread by our own @KarenRei - I'm humbled daily by the intelligence of the posters here and the insight I learn on any number of matters, sometimes even Tesla and investment related!

Nafnlaus on Twitter

And the unroll: Thread by @enn_nafnlaus: "It's recently been in the news that "International Rights Activists", a law firm run by Terry Collingsworth, has sued Google, Microsoft, App […]"

If the intention of the law firm was to sue the largest users of cobalt (regardless of actual sourcing, i.e. whether or not the company buys from Congo where illegal child labour mining is rampant), they have made a huge mistake by omitting the industry that uses the vast majority of cobalt: the gasoline refining industry to remove sulfur from crude oil.

Desulphurisation | Cobalt Institute

MODERATOR EDIT: Response, WARNING and IMPORTANT CORRECTION below: Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable

 

[Nocturnal]

A Sci-Am story long ago about electric cars for grid storage sparked my first interest in electric vehicles and so many other great things, making it my favorite Christmas gift magazine.

I work in Utility company software implementation/development so that's something I've been watching closely for years. The potential for utilities is enormous.

 

[UncaNed]

I bought a bunch of the Jan 2021 $690 calls for under a buck. Now they're going for $7.47 so clearly, people think there is some chance they won't expire worthless. I'm not selling mine just yet although there is a small chance they are at peak value. I didn't buy them to hold to expiration, just to make a nice profit since I suspected Tesla was in a bull phase and they would, at a minimum, increase in value in the near-term. Clearly it's working because they are up over 660%.

When did you buy them that they were under a buck?