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

[PeterJA]

In a rational world, this video alone would double Tesla's share price and halve the market caps of VW and other "Big Boy" competitors. Compare the elegance and creativity of Tesla's software to the lame attempt by Porsche (first linked by @Nakata):
Third Row Podcast on Twitter

Porsche's CEO admitted nearly 5 years ago that Tesla has "set the standard, where we have to follow..."
Porsche CEO: Tesla Has Set The Standard, We Must Follow
Yet Porsche STILL has not mustered decent software and GUI engineers, while other "Tesla killers" hope Apple CarPlay or Android Auto will help them catch up to Tesla. Good luck with that.

Of course we don't live in a rational world, but at some point in this Information Age, the fact of Tesla's superior engineering will become common knowledge.

 

[Buckminster]

Twitter
Don't take it to heart @Krugerrand - most likely it is the ambien talking....

 

[CaliBear1]

If any of the legacy auto manufacturers are going to go out of business, I really want it to be BMW. Let me explain:

BMW is 50% owned by two members of the Quandt family, Germany's richest family (Stefan Quandt and his sister Susanne Klatten, Germany's richest woman). Together with their siblings and cousins, the Quandts own a vast industrial empire, of which BMW is just a portion. They are the children of two half brothers, Herbert and Harald Quandt, who amassed their fortunes during the Third Reich on the backs of slave laborers. The Quandt brothers (and their father Guenther) profiteered mightily from their cozy connections with the top Nazi leadership: Harald Quandt was Joseph Goebbel's adopted son, and grew up in the Goebbels family. Adolf Hitler himself was the best man at his mother's wedding to Goebbels.

The Quandts owe their wealth directly to their support of the Nazi regime and the bloody exploitation in the concentration camps - something the family is unwilling to discuss. In 1943, and with direct support from the SS, the Quandts established a company-owned concentration camp adjacent to one of their factories in Hanover. There, they exploited the labor of Jews and resistance fighters from Denmark, France, and Czechoslovakia. The slave laborers were callously exposed to lethal levels of toxic chemicals, and no protective clothing or equipment was provided. Internal communications referred to a monthly "turnover" of 80 people, i.e., 80 workers would die each month. Immediately upon arrival the prisoners were told that they would not survive longer than six months. Those who survived against all odds recounted having to drink from toilets and being subjected to whippings. Despite these crimes, the Quandts managed to elude all punishment after the war.

The Quandts' sordid history is chronicled, with heart-wrenching testimony of survivors, in the award-winning documentary "The Silence of the Quandts".

While it is true that people should not be held responsible for their parents' crimes, the problem with the Quandts is that they have refused to apologize or offer any compensation to the survivors of the atrocities, or to their victims' families. Anybody who buys BMW stock today, or purchases their vehicles, directly supports and enriches this kind of people.

Sorry for the downer. Merry Christmas / happy holidays everyone!

Thank you for sharing. I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau and will be forever haunted by what I saw there. There is an Auschwitz Twitter account that tells the stories and fates of those who fell victim to the Nazi horrors of those concentration camps. It is a sad account, but worth adding so that we never forget.

If I had known this I never would've bought a BMW.

I should probably apply the same logic to pharmaceutical products that came from I.G. Farben and its successor, Bayer.

Big pivot here:

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to everyone here...even the mods! Ha.

Here's to a fantastic 2020 to all the TSLA HODLERS!

 

[CaliBear1]

As shorts start to cover, more shares become available for borrowing, the borrowing interest rate should go down, not up.

When shorts can't find shares to borrow, that's when fee goes up. Shareholder voting, too many shorts borrowing, large lenders decide to stop lending... those events lead to higher fees.

I always wonder about this. With such a huge float and so many shorts on the verge of margin calls or worse, couldn't a large institutional lender or a wildly wealthy individual like Larry Ellison legally induce a major short squeeze and profit wildly from it?

 

[sparcs]

As far as who's buying, I don't see why it can't be TRowe Price grabbing 15m shares.
They quit when Tesla was having ramping problems, now the problems are sorted, so the investment is solid.

Didn't Fidelity also dump shares around the same time?

I hadn't followed too closely what they have been doing since then.

 

[Green Pete]

I always wonder about this. With such a huge float and so many shorts on the verge of margin calls or worse, couldn't a large institutional lender or a wildly wealthy individual like Larry Ellison legally induce a major short squeeze and profit wildly from it?

I think for any one individual to buy such a large portion of the company would take quite a bit of time and cause the stock to rise significantly. Given that information it's entirely possible that it is happening and that's what has happened over the last 4 months.

 

[anthonyj]

One hot FUD coming right up! Thanks greentheonly!

Lora Kolodny on Twitter

 

[Toolsmack]

I always wonder about this. With such a huge float and so many shorts on the verge of margin calls or worse, couldn't a large institutional lender or a wildly wealthy individual like Larry Ellison legally induce a major short squeeze and profit wildly from it?

I’ve also entertained this idea of an institution taking their shares out of the lendable pool. Ihor stated that institutions wouldn’t risk the hit to all their future income lending all other company shares since it would mark them as untrustworthy to recall one name to force a squeeze.

On the other hand I’ve really wanted someone to ask Elon how many of his personal shares are being lent out to shorts, as based on the rules I am familiar with, if you have margin or loans(as Elon has said he does) against your shares, your lender can then loan out your shares for profit. Imagine Elon sitting on the ability to recall a large proportion of his shares from the short sellers(drool). Of course he’d have to pay off his loans on Tesla shares first.

 

[dc_h]

The data agrees with you. Today's non-FINRA reported volume was over 1 std dev above the mean (I have over 13 mths of daily data).

This has all the fingerprints of market-maker/large hedge fund manipulations. Didn't work though, did it?

View attachment 492615

Somebody B.I.G. greedily snapped up all those shorted shares, and went on to P.U.N.I.S.H. those short sellers with yet another close at the ATH, and right on the Upper-BB.

Merry Christmas, AJ!

Travis is selling all that Uber to buy up a tsla stake and run the robotaxi business. Shh, top secret.

 

[Davidzhao365]

TT007 may have made more money than any of us in the past few months.

But you sound like you have a pretty good handle on this. I will not pretend to give you advice.

Of course, goes with out saying if TSLA corrects for any reason your positions will be mauled.

Thanks for the reply! Any advice is welcome of course. I am really new to the stock market.

 

[AudubonB]

A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL FROM THE MOD SQUAD

 

[BornToFly]

When I cautioned against buying at ATH, I was referring to call options, not stock. If you buy stock and the SP tanks for a couple years, you can hold until it recovers because there is no time decay. I got excited by the end of 2018, and I loaded up with deep in the money LEAPS to a level that I never would have dreamed of doing a year earlier (1/3 of my portfolio). The stock was around 360 and the Model 3 was ramping well with deliveries scheduled to start in Europe and China in Q1 2019. Another profitable quarter was expected for Q4. I bought Jan 2020 LEAPS with 250 strike price (SHOULD have been a safe bet). The problem with reading posts here everyday when the stock is doing well is that we feed off of each other and the stories of big profits from options. We are also ahead of the curve when it comes to seeing Tesla's potential, and we can get ahead of the market's perception. There was no reason to think in December 2018 that the stock would drop from 360 to below 200 in June 2019, but it did, and several of the members here including myself got badly burned. I just don't want to see other Bulls here suffer our same fate. If you want to gamble on options with a little play money right now, that is fine. You might get lucky. Obviously, if the stock keeps climbing, you will make more money with Calls than you will with stock. But don't think that even deep in the money LEAPS are safe, because they are not.

Off the record, do I think the SP will go below 300 ever again? I don't, but nobody here knows for sure, even though some sound really intelligent and can pull out stock charts for days to back up their opinion.

 

[ggr]

I particularly like the "save video when honking horn" option. An obvious one and immediately turned on.

I used it myself just today... bozo started to change lanes while I was beside him, of course without indicating. Or maybe he was just drifting, hard to tell.

 

[Zaxxon]

I particularly like the "save video when honking horn" option. An obvious one and immediately turned on.

Hopefully they fixed the save behavior to also include the file for the minute occurring when the save is kicked off. I haven't tested it lately, but the original dash cam implemention would result in a save-on-honk leaving out the action directly preceding the honk. Which would defeat the purpose, so I have to think they've made the save action more intelligent than it was prior.

One hot FUD coming right up! Thanks greentheonly!

Lora Kolodny on Twitter

Not really FUD. Tesla has a long and well-documented (on this board, even) history of open-source license non-compliance. I hope they get their act together at some point.

 

[Davidzhao365]

When I cautioned against buying at ATH, I was referring to call options, not stock. If you buy stock and the SP tanks for a couple years, you can hold until it recovers because there is no time decay. I got excited by the end of 2018, and I loaded up with deep in the money LEAPS to a level that I never would have dreamed of doing a year earlier (1/3 of my portfolio). The stock was around 360 and the Model 3 was ramping well with deliveries scheduled to start in Europe and China in Q1 2019. Another profitable quarter was expected for Q4. I bought Jan 2020 LEAPS with 250 strike price (SHOULD have been a safe bet). The problem with reading posts here everyday when the stock is doing well is that we feed off of each other and the stories of big profits from options. We are also ahead of the curve when it comes to seeing Tesla's potential, and we can get ahead of the market's perception. There was no reason to think in December 2018 that the stock would drop from 360 to below 200 in June 2019, but it did, and several of the members here including myself got badly burned. I just don't want to see other Bulls here suffer our same fate. If you want to gamble on options with a little play money right now, that is fine. You might get lucky. Obviously, if the stock keeps climbing, you will make more money with Calls than you will with stock. But don't think that even deep in the money LEAPS are safe, because they are not.

Off the record, do I think the SP will go below 300 ever again? I don't, but nobody here knows for sure, even though some sound really intelligent and can pull out stock charts for days to back up their opinion.

Thanks so much for the story. It is truly valuable to me personally because I am adding more to my options now, hoping Q1 2020 profit is strong enough to fight any headwinds. I think this is the similar thinking to what you had a year ago.

I wonder during the 1sr half of 2019, did you try to sell the options? Was it hard to sell when it was going down? I never experienced that so worried that liquidity is an issue.

 

[Davidzhao365]

What do people think?


1. What will the competition look like?
No real competitor like Google or 50% 50% like Android and iPhone? (Android phone camps: Huawei, Samsung and etc.)

2. What will the gross margin look like when auto is at the peak?
Apple is about 38%. Google 65%.
Tesla seems more like half hardware and half software, so I guess it will be similar to Apple.

 

[sparcs]

Didn't Fidelity also dump shares around the same time?

I hadn't followed too closely what they have been doing since then.

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable

there's an old post with discussion about Fidelity having 16 million Tesla shares at one point (in 2018?). Down to 9 million in early 2019.

Is it correct they only have about 5 million now?

T. Rowe Price dumps most of its Tesla stake

t rowe price had almost 9 million shares at one point in 2018. Looks like they dumped most of it early 2019.

 

[BornToFly]

Thanks so much for the story. It is truly valuable to me personally because I am adding more to my options now, hoping Q1 2020 profit is strong enough to fight any headwinds. I think this is the similar thinking to what you had a year ago.

I wonder during the 1sr half of 2019, did you try to sell the options? Was it hard to sell when it was going down? I never experienced that so worried that liquidity is an issue.

I didn't try to sell early on because I knew that Tesla had no real competition and Q1 delivery problems were temporary. I also couldn't imagine to stock price going below 320, then 300, then 250, etc. Then I was sure the stock price would recovered after Q2 results, then after Q3 delivery numbers. Finally I took a loss before Q3 results because I didn't want to lose absolutely everything. Nobody expected a big profit and a run to 425. It is really hard to sell when the stock price is going down, but you know that the company you are invested in is getting stronger and stronger. It doesn't matter how right you are if the market doesn't see it and there is time decay involved.

 

[MP3Mike]

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019 Investors' Roundtable

there's an old post with discussion about Fidelity having 16 million Tesla shares at one point (in 2018?). Down to 9 million in early 2019.

Is it correct they only have about 5 million now?

T. Rowe Price dumps most of its Tesla stake

t rowe price had almost 9 million shares at one point in 2018. Looks like they dumped most of it early 2019.

Yahoo Finance doesn't even list T. Rowe Price in their top holders:

Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Stock Major Holders - Yahoo Finance

I didn't have the patience to dig through all of the holders on NASDAQ but I didn't see them there either:

Tesla, Inc. Common Stock (TSLA) Institutional Holdings

 

[Artful Dodger]

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays to all. May you and your's be blessed in 2020.

Vienna Boys Choir - Stille Nacht (Silent Night)

Cheers!