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

[Buckminster]

Only 8 days to P&D numbers. Or will there be a delay? Hopefully the new delivery methods mean Tesla can keep deliveries in line with production and minimise inventory. This is important to confirm 100% to the market that the cars are still going to sell through the crisis and beyond.

One option is to have the car dropped wherever you want. You could have it dropped at you BMW retailer for instance - sell your vehicle back to them for 25% of the original RRP and walk 50 yards to your new future.

Given the shutdown, is anyone expecting deliveries to exceed production by a big margin or will the deliveries be hampered by C19?

 

[Oil4AsphaultOnly]

So, this played out well with the deep ITM 350 calls. Since I am a noob in options, could you please opine?
I bought 1 call, and I find 350 to be a desirable price. Expiration is far away $350 June 17,2022. My break-even on this is 504, which was exceeded today. I am still accumulating shares, so I'd like to have that 100 shares, however other expenditures are planned between now and June 2022. Can I just hold the call till then and just plan to have 35k by then in my [taxable] account?

Yes, but check with your broker about exercising your call. Some brokers will do it automatically at option expiration as long as it's in the money, others require you to exercise the option yourself (should have a link/button for you to click on their website).

Alternatively, you could also sell the call (if there's any time-value left in it) and add the proceeds to your 35k to buy your 100 shares. Usually DITM (deep in the money) calls have almost no time-value left in them, so it's better to do this sooner rather than later.

 

[CaliBear1]

I never really understood the staggering difference between a million dollars and a trillion dollars until it was put in the framework of seconds. It's almost incomprehensible!

A million seconds = 11.5 days

A billion seconds = 31 years (yikes!)

A trillion seconds = 31,000 years (gulp!)

I wish I understood this kind of thing better. Where does this money come from?. Is it borrowed? Does it have to be paid back? 6 trillion is such a huge number. Many of us in Canada are freaking because we are running up a 100 billion dollar deficit to try and remedy this. 6 trillion? Wow. Big number. I know. 10 times as many people as well. Still. We are not American citizens but we live there part of the year, own property, pay taxes, contribute and volunteer in our community. Two completely different societies, but we enjoy both. Should be interesting how it affects those of us in our situation.

 

[hobbes]

Touchless delivery in Belgium - this is as of yesterday and AFAIK Belgium already had quite strict Corona rules for a few days, so it seems they can continue delivering like this in spite of the limitations. Wonder how much that limits the number of cars they will be able to deliver till end of quarter. Actually the process itself is quicker, question is if they can do it a all deliery centers and if all customers accept it.

 

[Causalien]

Senate, White House reach $2 trillion stimulus deal to blunt coronavirus fallout |
The Washington Post | Wed, Mar 24, 01:07 am EDT

"Senate leaders and the Trump administration reached agreement early Wednesday on a $2 trillion stimulus package to rescue the economy from the coronavirus assault, potentially setting the stage for swift passage of the massive legislation through both chambers of Congress.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are done. We have a deal,” White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland told reporters around 1 a.m.
​

Not so fast.
The house, with Dems as majority and Nancy Pelosi at the helm is the roadblock.

 

[EVMeister]

Given the shutdown, is anyone expecting deliveries to exceed production by a big margin or will the deliveries be hampered by C19?

Yes.

 

[StealthP3D]

Given the shutdown, is anyone expecting deliveries to exceed production by a big margin or will the deliveries be hampered by C19?

I'm not sure how deliveries could exceed production "by a big margin" since Tesla cleared out the delivery channels quite effectively last quarter. Where would the excess cars come from?

 

[FrankSG]

TSLA @ $546 in Europe

 

[NicoV]

Touchless delivery in Belgium - this is as of yesterday and AFAIK Belgium already had quite strict Corona rules for a few days, so it seems they can continue delivering like this in spite of the limitations. Wonder how much that limits the number of cars they will be able to deliver till end of quarter. Actually the process itself is quicker, question is if they can do it a all deliery centers and if all customers accept it.

That’s the SC in Latem, near Ghent, which also services my car. It serves East and West Flanders, that’s a big chunk the Tesla buying public in Belgium. Last time I went there they didn’t have the locker shown in the video. Which is a pretty nice way to deliver the keycard.
Note that the tire center 500 meter down the road that was supposed to do my winter to summer tire switch last Thursday called me last week to cancel my appointment because they closed obeying the lockdown that started Wednesday noon.
In Belgium people still have to go to work, but it is unclear to me what if they have to do if they need the customers to be physically present.

 

[CorneliusXX]

Kind of. I want to buy several thousand more shares under $300. And the Puts I bought as a hedge are red now. But I think today was a blip over stimulus package, and the dream that this will be over in a week. It is not possible for the shutdown to last less than another month, probably two months, and maybe three. I can wait....

It's difficult to judge when the market will see the bottom. But given the are forward looking it may come as soon as the daily % increase in infections/ deaths starts to fall even as the real number of infections / deaths continues to increase. That is probably not too far away given the lockdown scenarios we are seeing globally.

 

[Pezpunk]

I'm not sure how deliveries could exceed production "by a big margin" since Tesla cleared out the delivery channels quite effectively last quarter. Where would the excess cars come from?

exactly. deliveries CAN'T exceed production, because there were practically zero cars in inventory at the end of last quarter.

 

[Eugene Ash]

It can be heavy wading, but I commend Modern Monetary Theory to you to try and get your arms around why it might work.

Two key ideas:
- for a sovereign currency issuer, they don't have a constraint of defaulting on debts issued in their currency (they can always issue more to pay the debts). Instead, they have an inflation constraint. And so far, inflation is saying we can take on more.
- It is a false equivalence to think of the US government as somehow equivalent but for scale, of a household or even a state government. The difference is as above - the US government can issue currency for the debts denominated in that currency - we as households do not have the ability to print money in the currency our debts are due in. (It's important our budgets are balanced or in surplus - there's an argument to be made that the US government needs to run a deficit).

Here's a starting point.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

This is a topic I find fascinating, and have my own thoughts on. Good stuff for a different thread sometime if you're interested

Sorry, could not pass up an invitation to a good discussion, so I created this thread for MMT: MMT.

 

[Thekiwi]

Going by the current pre-market trading price of almost $550 - Tesla has increased by almost $200 in less than a weeks worth of trading.

 

[heltok]

$555.55 Premarket. In thai 5=haa , 555 = hahaha

Looks like it’s gonna be a fun day to be a TSLA holder!

 

[dw4ngg]

Going by the current pre-market trading price of almost $550 - Tesla has increased by almost $200 in less than a weeks worth of trading.

Peanuts compared to our rise from 550 pre earnings to 880 ish or whatever it was the day it hit ATH.

 

[Quesder]

Wake up at 2:21 am PST, $564 is it time to sell?

 

[CyberDutchie]

Not so fast.
The house, with Dems as majority and Nancy Pelosi at the helm is the roadblock.

I don’t think so, Pelosi doesn’t want to bring members to the house for a vote so intends to pass with unanimous consent.

 

[EVMeister]

Wake up at 2:21 am PST, $564 is it time to sell?

If it's causing you to lose sleep like that, do it... Or just hold and stop looking at the stock price for a bit.

 

[avoigt]

So the question remains what will be the impact of the Q1 deliveries report.

I think we can all agree it is extremely hard to tell what Tesla will report. Prior to this madness, I was expecting that we will beat market expectations with ~115k production and ~100-105 deliveries maybe. Lately, mainly based on @Troy`s projections I have downgraded my expectations to 90-99k... but even so, with the latest quarantine measures around the world and the Fremont shutdown I would not be surprised if we only hit the high 80s. We were at ~80k produced about 2 weeks ago at the 1 million announcement, so normally production would just have surpassed 100k, but deliveries are harder to predict.

Having said that, what I am really torn about is whether this will even matter at all? Tesla may report 95k deliveries. No wait, let`s go crazy: 105k. Who cares? I think what everyone will be focusing on is any Q2 guidance... and that won`t be pretty.

It is uncertain how long before Fremont can open again. Reading our US posters I feel like in mentality they are 2-3 weeks behind us Europeans. I agree with @NicoV, that you can observer this shift in mindset as things become more serious. It`s all just a media report, a bit over hyped maybe you may think, then things start getting out of hand pretty close to home and you radically start to see things in a different light.

I don`t feel like Wall Street, or even our American TMC posters here are there yet. So I am concerned as well, if things deteriorate over the next week or so, how TSLA and the markets may react.

@avoigt this is one of those rare occasions where we disagree. I would love for you to be right, but I would wait until I see several days of sustained decline of new cases before I accept it is more than just variation in the data.

Data is just data there is nothing to agree to disagree. Let me know if you refer to something else.

About new cases in Europe
We have several days with either decline (Italy) or flattened (Germany) curve already with a few outliers growing (Spain). Interestingly this goes from the east to the west while the west is partly still increasing. Looking at Europe only data its kind of flat but that may change if a country goes exponential. My early hopes remain that Europe will get this under control - still some countries e.g. UK concern me.

The US does concern me as well as I am not sure that the measure will be sufficient and we all know about the US health care system.

Over time 60-70% will be infected before the world gets herd immunity. Thats not a danger but just the nature of any infection in different degrees. The question is how we get to that %age.

Right now we may see a scenario in the US where the economy get s wicker back to business than expected but thats paid with a high death rate and many victims.

 

[Thekiwi]

CNBC reporting that SpaceX headquarters has confirmed Covid-19 cases. What are the chances Elon might have to self isolate for a couple of weeks?

(it’s written by a troll so won’t give them a link)