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

[humbaba]

So no squeeze yet, then? We still have that to look forward to, assuming Ihor's numbers are correct.

Oh, but Ihor already did his blog post about $TSLA being in a short squeeze at the start of the run. It was posted here a couple of times I think.

 

[Krugerrand]

P.S. "losses after being down -$632mm yesterday" <-- Shortzes lost more yesterday than Tesla spent in CapEx to build out GF3/Shanghai Phase 1 (and bring to Production status)... about $132mm more! Bahaha!

But doesn’t that also make you sad or disappointed or mad? If the money they lost yesterday had been used for good, for the mission, how much further ahead would we be?

 

[humbaba]

Could one of you explain to an options newbie how the percentage of selling tagged to shorts can be 60% day after day after day? On the face of it, it seems like they should run out of ammo after a certain number of days of that.

How can they do that? Easy. Trades are grouped into blocks. If just one of the trades in a block is a short sale then the entire block is marked as a short sale. You might expect random distribution to occur and make it possible to track the relative amount of shorting but I don't know how reasonable that would be as I have no insight into how the trades are grouped.

So 60% is an upper bound on how much short trading there was, the lower bound is 60% of the trade blocks. That's quite a spread.

Doing it day after day? When the stock was range bound the smart shorts (and I'm sure some of the larger ones are) shorted high and covered low. That allows a lot of bank to be made, which can then be used to short more once it goes back up. In fact, if you are successful at running the ups and downs you are growing how much you can short $TSLA. Much the same as someone trading the opposite direction.

Of course, if the stock moves up to a high enough trading range the shares shorted won't keep up without more money being thrown into the short. Which is part of why I'm curious to see the short numbers for end of December, and eventually for mid January. Will that value at risk keep up with the rise in stock price or remain -- more or less -- constant? I'm not expecting it to keep up -- the percentage short to fall -- by mid January, but we'll see.

 

[avoigt]

Covered his position from 20% to 10% to 5%

Teslaconomics on Twitter

 

[lklundin]

Don’t be silly. I have it under good authority there will be a sell off at $485ish.

- or some permutation of those three digits.

Ten minutes left before the work day gets shot to hell....

 

[ZachF]

Perhaps someone whose watched this more carefully than myself can fill in the details,

but, isn’t the timing of entry into the S&P 500 substantially impacted by non-Tesla specific events such as 1) when another company exits the S&P due to a merger or something of the sort or 2) S&P choosing to update its composition of companies? Is 2) known to be on any regular schedule or ad hoc?

I would think they would just kick out a small cap stock.

I think Lynch, Soros, and Buffet all had deals not available to individual investors. Equity stakes, etc. If you restrict the list of fund managers to those who buy publically traded companies at market prices, I don't think any of them have consistently beat the S&P500. Buffet made the famous 10-year bet in 2008: Warren Buffett beat the hedge funds. Here's how

"His (Buffet's) pick, the S&P 500 (OEX), gained 125.8% over ten years. The five hedge funds, picked by a firm called Protégé Partners, added an average of about 36%. The names of the funds were not disclosed.

You can see a graph of the performance of each individual fund here:

Buffett's Bet with the Hedge Funds: And the Winner Is …

So, even without averaging all the funds together, Protege Partners couldn't even pick one fund out of five top funds of their choosing to beat the SP500 Index over a 10 year period (or was it 9 years).

So that's a nice excuse for why fund managers can't beat the common index fund but it doesn't really hold water. The truth of the matter is all the MBA and Finance degrees in the world will not make you competent enough to consistently beat the SP500 Index over time. The difference in performance was so stark, even had the fund managers waived their customary fees, they STILL would have lost the bet!

But the fund managers still get their management fees....

 

[Chickenlittle]

Ihor Dusaniwsky on Twitter

$TSLA short int is $13.69bn ; 27.82mm shs shorted; 20.79% of float; 0.30% borrow fee. Shs shorted up +464k shs, +1.7%, over last 30 days as price rose +45% & up +132k shs,+0.5%, last week. Shorts down -$2.02bn in January mark-to-market losses after being down -$632mm yesterday.

Tesla will remain heavily shorted even after a short squeeze. The price increase proves an attractive target and many will replace shorts squeezed out people who have lost will blame timing and attempt to make up their loses. The stock will drop a bit at some point and attract more on the short side

 

[humbaba]

Covered his position from 20% to 10% to 5%

Teslaconomics on Twitter

Hey, at least he [Speigel] still has 5%! C'mon, man, ya just gotta believe! I wish he'd lose more money on this.

To comments about the money being better spent elsewhere? Sure, that'd be great. But as he isn't going to do that, the least he can do is enrich us investors.

 

[Silentk]

Tesla will remain heavily shorted even after a short squeeze. The price increase proves an attractive target and many will replace shorts squeezed out people who have lost will blame timing and attempt to make up their loses. The stock will drop a bit at some point and attract more on the short side

 

[Artful Dodger]

Can anybody explain what the squeeze could look like? I did some reading on the VW/Porsche squeeze which was a result of massive options being accumulated by Porsche which lowered the shares available to trade to lower than the short interest. How does that compare to the current situation? Did short interest get released yesterday? And what is the available float now?

Read the NY Times article circa 1998. Be aware that trading rules vis-à-vis short selling are different in Frankfurt than in the USA. Not an Apples to Pomegranates comparison.

 

[humbaba]

Tesla will remain heavily shorted even after a short squeeze. The price increase proves an attractive target and many will replace shorts squeezed out people who have lost will blame timing and attempt to make up their loses. The stock will drop a bit at some point and attract more on the short side

True, the higher the goes "the more attractive" it becomes as a short position. But! the higher it goes the more it costs to maintain the same short interest as a percentage. Or, put another way, maintaining the same value at risk results in a lower short interest percentage.

At some point I do expect the unusually large short interest in $TSLA to diminish. It'll never go away, but the higher the stock goes the lower percentage I expect.

 

[Johan]

Well, let's hope they dont slap the cuffs on Musk at 10AM tomorrow morning.

 

[bubb]

Tesla will remain heavily shorted even after a short squeeze. The price increase proves an attractive target and many will replace shorts squeezed out people who have lost will blame timing and attempt to make up their loses. The stock will drop a bit at some point and attract more on the short side

Totally agree, but I can only hope we are nearing the point where the loony "TSLA is a zero/fraud/etc" crowd become marginalized and future battles will mostly be over valuation...

 

[KarenRei]

Wonder if we'll get an ER date announced tomorrow or Monday....

 

[printf42]

Ihors estimates have, historically, been wrong every time there is significant change. No one should put any stock into his imaginings.

But his words is a good gauge on shorter sentiments, just assume what he said is what he(or someone behind him) want market to hear, not necessarily the truth.

Only problem is I don’t know what I should make out of it.

 

[Nocturnal]

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Well, let's hope they dont slap the cuffs on Musk at 10AM tomorrow morning.

Do you think his "clients" (presumably grandma) will think it's funny while he burns their money and "watches with amusement"?

 

[LJS22]

Hit a new high at 498.80 before that dip

 

[Dangerous Fish]

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Well, let's hope they dont slap the cuffs on Musk at 10AM tomorrow morning.

What a vile person that Spiegel is.

 

[willow_hiller]

Wonder if we'll get an ER date announced tomorrow or Monday....

Just looking it up, the NASDAQ is estimating the ER date as January 29, and says the concensus EPS is for Q4 is only $0.08: Tesla, Inc. Common Stock (TSLA) Earnings Report Date

 

[Nocturnal]

There they try with the dip. lol

What a vile person that Spiegel is.

Textbook cognitive dissonance. His mind literally can't accept his massive mistakes so it doubles down on his beliefs.