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

[Dare]

“The Model S was a good first shot. But that hatch hurt the rigidity too much. I'm fixing all the mistakes I made with it," he said.

Funny. That’s what many people state they miss about the Model 3 vs the S and has since been added to the Y. I know I like the hatch for the S.

One was I wanted to design the best electric car imaginable. Surpass my last one, the Model S. I want to engineer my baby. The other is that you have to change the damn name. So we did (to Lucid).

We're gonna break glass, kick ass, and take names! What do we call it?

LUCID

 

[phantasms]

I thought we're supposed to bounce at the end. lol

 

[EV forever]

Well, I did my part to help. Bought 1 share in honor of 4/20

Of course 5 seconds after I buy at 751 the stock has to drop to 745.

 

[phantasms]

Of course 5 seconds after I buy at 751 the stock has to drop to 745.

Oh so YOU did this to us!?!

 

[jhm]

No way I'm clicking that. I can only stand so much happiness at once and I'm pretty sure everyone over there is past my limit.

Ah, come on, we've got a big surprise for first-timers.

 

[hacer]

Tesla says the Model 3 has 17 moving parts, not "80-120". the article seems to be just making up numbers right and left.

That won't even account for each of the balls in the wheel bearings.

 

[MTL_HABS1909]

Of course 5 seconds after I buy at 751 the stock has to drop to 745.

Typical TSLA. Trades sideways for hours and 3 mins from close it drops.

 

[LJS22]

The 1% drop was in line with Nasdaq

 

[ggr]

The 1% drop was in line with Nasdaq

For TSLA, "in line with NASDAQ" would normally mean about twice the percentage movement. TSLA actually held up very well, flat most of the day while all the other indexes were falling, and then ended down less (proportionally).

 

[wipster]

If WTI dips any lower I'm hitching a trough to the Jeep and driving to Texas for a few $5 barrels of oil.

I heard they're paying you to take it!

 

[larmor]

An inflection point was coming with regards to oil, where they can’t even give the oil away. Oil has a zero value now and energy from the sun has always been zero dollars too. Both have a little bit of capital involved, more for oil getting less for solar.

 

[Artful Dodger]

The 1% drop was in line with Nasdaq

TSLA never trades 'in line' with the NASDAQ-100 ( I use QQQ as a proxy since it also reports After-hrs). TSLA usually moves at some multiple of the QQQ such as 2x, which it did most of today since 08:00 hrs.

The 1st MMD was a move against the QQQ macro trend, but TSLA recovered quickly. The 2nd MMD was with the macros but at a higher multipler, and was also defeated.

However in the last 10 minutes of the main session, TSLA moved 9.4x vs the QQQ. The multiplier from 15:30 to the Close avg'd 2.4x.

That's how they do it. This IS manipulation.

Doesn't sound like a big deal? If TSLA dropped at just 2x vs QQQ (instead of 9.4x), then TSLA would have closed at $750.51 instead of $746.36

That's $765M in TSLA market cap extracted via manipulation. And it will affect this evening's margin calls.

The Close is the SP of record. This matters (c.f. 6-mth and 30-day Market Cap targets)

Regards,
Lodger

 

[Bad Horse]

It's almost as if shutting down significant parts of China, and now doing the same to South Korea, and soon Italy, and Germany and Japan either in recession or near it is somehow, somehow dragging this down. Can't be that an over built and over extended US economy is not built on solid fundamentals of true growth and value. Colored me shocked, shocked I tell you that a correction was not impending.

This whole thing has been teetering on a unsustainable edge, looks like it might finally be coming home to roost (this is a take on the whole economy, don't really care about the Tesla stock, but it's going to suffer).

I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so.

 

[hershey101]

There has been some serious consolidation on $TSLA for the past 3-4 days. It wants to move, bigly. The only question is in which direction?
I expect a $100 move the next day or two. I'm inclined to say it goes up on a rally into earnings next week, but if the markets revert, it could very well just revisit $600ish...
I'd prefer $600 vs $900 going into earnings, but /shrug who knows.

 

[Dwdnjck]

I hate to sound like chicken little, but shouldn't all hell be breaking loose at this point? USD is heavily tied to Oil. Oil companies have billions in debt they took on to finance all their operations. This seems like major meltdown territory?

Don’t worry. Now they can qualify for “small business” loans.

 

[dl003]

I don't want to say I told you so, but I told you so.

You told us nothing actionable. No magnitude of decline. No bottom. 6 weeks later we're only 15% down.

 

[MC3OZ]

Cheap oil has both positive and negative aspects to the American and global economies. It wasn't that long ago that nothing could boost the stock market like news of cheaper oil. The thing is, oil profits tended to be used AGAINST Tesla, not for it. Oilmen do not typically drive a Tesla or have solar on their roof.

If the theory that big oil was "investing" in their future by shorting Tesla is true, oil this cheap should put a quick end to any new oil money being used for that purpose. A rarely mentioned positive of cheap oil is that it could benefit Tesla in an out-sized way by causing a HUGE wind-down of much of the Tesla short interest. I bet short interest in TSLA is (and has been) declining at an unprecedented rate.

Even if we don't believe big oil is involved in shorting Tesla, shorts had money to invest after shorting Tesla.

Someone with a high conviction that Tesla is a bad business is more likely to invest in Oil and legacy auto.

It is a fair bet some of that short money was reinvested in Ford and GM, and for a time dividends help fund interest payments.

To close out a Tesla position, shorts will need to get the money from somewhere, that will often involve a double whammy, taking a hit on their other investment, and taking a hit on their Tesla short.

Similarly for funds a lot of them hold oil stocks, with the market downturn and the oil price collapse, they need to give investors bad news, if they shorted Tesla (as many have) that means even more bad news...

Apart from short covering, there is one other potential factor in play, Tesla is looking more and more like a "safe haven", not totally immune from the general macro environment, but very likely to survive and out perform.. A lot of other stocks are looking anything but a safe haven and a lot of fund managers, need to consider the mix of their portfolio... they need a few winners to cancel out the losers and they need a hedge against an uncertain future for oil stocks...

 

[MC3OZ]

With the economic downturn a lot of airlines are struggling, the case for a battery powered VTOL plane for short haul flights looks stronger each day...

We know Elon has a design in mind, it looks likely that this project will stack up one day, the capital cost of planes and the cost of fuel are major expenses, savings in these area will redraw the market... so a key consideration is the cost of the VTOL plane...

i have a hunch multiple smaller planes might work better on short haul, once the fuel cost is lower, that is a more regular schedule, with less space needed to land and store planes, with planes initially departing smaller airports.... in fact the number of airports in a city, and the average size of domestic airports may change.

 

[FrankSG]

I'm dying to see some data around deliveries so far in Q2, even anecdotal info.

Here you go:

Distantly related piece of information from Europe:

Went for a M3 test drive on Saturday. After the drive we had a chat inside Tesla store with the sales guys. Local inventory is quite dry already where I live, but I was offered configurations that are currently located in Zeebrugge. They quite openly browsed inventory in front of me in "staff-mode" or whatever it's called. That lists vehicles from Zeebrugge in addition to local inventory. It seems like they are storing vehicles at the port or somewhere nearby since vehicle location was Zeebrugge. They had both SR+ and LR left with towing hitch option (my requirement). Some colors were unavailable though. They also said inventory is already somewhat reduced from the end of Q1 levels. It looks like inventory is moving, but there are still plenty of cars left. Considering that some countries are completely closed this doesn't look too bad. Once Fremont reopens and first shipments arrive I'm confident there is no inventory left in Europe.

Another interesting point: Tesla financing offer had 2,4% interest. Most dealers are offering either 0% or 0,99% rate here. That is a strong signal they are not worried.

 

[Artful Dodger]

After-action Report: Mon, Apr 20, 2020: (Full-Day's Trading)

VWAP: $748.16
Volume: 14,759,489
Traded: $11,042,444,692.21 ($11.42 B)

Closing SP / VWAP: 99.75%
(TSLA closed BELOW today's Avg SP)​

FINRA Short/Total Volume = 58.2% (51st Percentile rank Shorting)
FINRA Volume / Total NASDAQ Vol = 43.6% (45th Percentile rank FINRA Reporting)

Comment: "TSLA Piinned by Market Makers"

A $579 VWAP print for TSLA occurred After-hrs at 18-58 which messes with the NASDAQ chart scaling when plotting both TSLA and the macros (QQQ). Instead, here are two separate charts for those, including the after-hrs chart for TSLA from Google:



Cheers!