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

[SMAlset]

Well we don’t have that exact situation. We can only work with what we have. And even though those other automotive companies are in other states, the scenario of a democratic governor, COVID deaths, etc are all pretty darn close.

Sure but every governing body is doing it their way as is very evident by who's opening up and to what level. Just saying I don't think Tesla can cry foul here based on what other companies in other parts of the country are doing. We live where we do and right now they are more concerned about individuals health and slowing getting businesses back to operations.

 

[LJS22]

Seriously, are you guys just TSLA investors and not car owners? The paint quality on their cars (I've had 3) is worse than KIA.

Certainly no where near the Luxury brands they are trying to compete with (Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, etc.)


EDIT - and yes, paint is the single biggest gripe I have about the cars.

Paint seems fine. Go get it wrapped or protective covering if you are personally picky about paint. It’s not a big concern for me, but I see it doesn’t meet your standards.

Good news for you is Tesla is going to be doing a new paint technique starting with giga Berlin that will “pop” a little more. Hopefully the quality improves on that change.

I still view Tesla as a young company. They just recently started mass manufacturing cars. They’ll get better across the board as time goes on

 

[Artful Dodger]

After-action Report: Tue, May 12, 2020: (Full-Day's Trading)

VWAP: $828.91
Volume: 15,822,329
Traded: $13,115,281,622.70 ($13.12 B)

Closing SP / VWAP: 97.56%
(TSLA closed BELOW today's Avg SP)​

FINRA Short/Total Volume = 41.4% (43rd Percentile rank Shorting)
FINRA Volume / Total NASDAQ Vol = 58.6% (61st Percentile rank FINRA Reporting)
See my comment #164428 about unusual Naked Short Selling today.

Comment: "Macros slump -3.0%; TMC argues Paint* "

* Off-topic-de-jour painted this thread unusable this afternoon. Congrats to the instigator. /S

 

[EVNow]

Lora Kolodny contributed misleading to the above report.

But...

M/M comparisons are misleading. Tesla has a quarterly delivery cycle. The first month of the quarter is always the smallest. Better to compare Q/Q: 3635 Model 3 China deliveries in April 2020 to 3813 Model 3 China deliveries in Jan 2020.

Tesla’s China Sales Fell in March. Why It Doesn’t Matter For the Stock.

Not sure I agree. The quarterly cycle is because of the infamous wave - that doesn’t apply to China anymore because of local production.

The price reduction to get Model 3 to be eligible for rebates gives us a hint. May will give us a better idea. But I need to re-examine assumptions of 30 or 40k China sales in Q2.

 

[Bunky]

So Alameda County has pressure from Elon, Mnuchin, Trump, Pelosi (just saw on Twitter, not sure if true) and many others. The state has given the go ahead for manufacturing to resume and they also have a comprehensive plan from Tesla. What exactly are they waiting for?

 

[EVNow]

FINRA doesn't track or report on derivatives, so I have no data source to do such a comparison ( paging @FrankSG ). Options are real-time data w/o archives, whereas FINRA washes out intraday time stamps, releasing only a single daily volume summary.

So only a statistical approach in theory could be able to tease out relationships. But they'd be correlations after many such events, not proof of a single event since FINRA also strips out the identities of short exempt traders.

In summary, at best we're given a glimpse at the shadow of movement behind a curtain, but the smell is noticable...

Regards,
Lodger

Yahoo gives EOD options stats. I have to check whether volume is included.

 

[jerry33]

The paint on my 2013 silver model S seems perfect to me and several people have specifically complimented how the paint looks. But perhaps I was just lucky.

No, I have had the same experience on my 2013 S. However, paint is paint and you will always get some bad ones. Happens to every car manufacturer I'm aware of regardless of factory location. If this wasn't the case, the companies doing paint correction wouldn't exist.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Here's an interesting article from Fred Lambert of Electrek:

Tesla superfandom becomes toxic, negative for electric revolution [op-ed] - Electrek

I know he's often portrayed here as having become teslaq, but his stance seems very reasonable to me.. The last week the very aggressive attack-dog style of thirdrowtesla has been bothering me, and Fred's article kind of hits home for me.

Please read to the end.. I think he has excellent advise..

Fred shouldn't get a single ounce of sympathy from any investor here. He has done more harm to investors in the past couple of years with his clickbait articles and headlines than the good that he used to do for EV's. His toilet paper article a year ago was trash and right up there with the worst FUD articles put out by shorts.

The issue with Fred is that he's a joke of a journalist.

-He says he has "sources" that are 50% of the time wrong. He takes no accountability for when his "sources" are wrong
-He does apparently have or used to have some sort of source, which he then leaked private tesla information(Hey Fred thanks for posting interior refresh images and then proceed to say "Coming soon".....2 years later ).
-He let's his personal interactions with tesla affect his journalism....if Fred feels slighted by Tesla personally he turns into a crybaby and uses his site for essentially his own personal opinion piece while still claiming to be fair and balanced
- He openly steals content from other sites and then of course proceeds to accuses others of not giving him credit.
- And the most obvious....clickbait headlines and articles.

To be frank, I think Fred's ego is the source of all of it. Things were great for him when he was the center of the EV world 3 to 4 years ago. Now he's lost a lot of foot traffic to other sites like Teslarati and Twitter accounts that have more news/information that he does. He does the clickbait because well he needs clicks and traffic to his site.

Do I have a bias against Fred? Sure. I have a bias against a number of things. The difference is I'm not running a site pretending to be a balanced and fair source of EV news.

I promise not to respond to any responses to this post. I know it's OT

 

[SMAlset]

An additional test is what other businesses are allowed to open or stay open in Alameda County, and what are the relative risk levels.

Gali also pointed out that the rate of new infections per head of population is Michigan is higher than California and other car markers are opening in Michigan.

I have do doubt some parts of the US are opening too early and risks are being poorly managed, but I also think Fremont is lower risk than many other permitted activities.

Elon is perhaps slightly unwise getting into the broader debate to the extend that he has, because the safe operation for Fremont is entirely different to the safe operation of the US. I have a lot of faith in the former, and not much faith on the later. Elon needs to realise how incompetent a lot of businesses, bureaucrats and politicians in the US are.

I have no doubt he and Tesla are attempting to open up in as safe a way as they can and as quickly as they can. I won't be at all surprised if Detroit doesn't see a big rise in the spread there and they've been hit really hard with the virus. If this stupid virus wasn't capable of infecting so many people so easily and stealthily, things would be much easier to control. We are still learning so much from what this CV19 is capable of and don't really know the long term effects it will have on those that have been infected. Don't know about reinfection, about any immunity, and look at what some children are now experiencing (and some deaths from) as a good example of how unprepared doctors are to fight it. Right now the best thing is to not get infected.

 

[MC3OZ]

I think what you call "underpaint" is Tesla reducing the amount of paint applied to each car to keep within the emissions limit that California allows while producing as many cars as possible. (This may also be why Tesla doesn't have a solid roof option on the S, 3, or Y, to reduce the amount of paint required per vehicle.) If they painted all the areas that aren't visible from the outside they would have to paint fewer cars. I don't have an issue with this.



This is definitely an issue that they need to improve on. I don't know the root cause, dirty paint shop, bad filtration, poor separation of activities, etc. But it is obvious they have a problem there. And I hope they can, and will, fix it. Especially since the problem then blossoms; their delivery prep people try to fix them and make things worse. (At least in some locations.) This is another area they could improve, pre-delivery prep...

I would be interesting to know how big a problem this California emissions problem is, Tesla might be able to capture a lot of the emissions but not 100%, they may be able to use newer paint formulations with lower emissions.

It is worth expending some R&D effort on doing it better.

But if it can't be solved, perhaps there is a case for eventually reducing Model 3/Y production at Fremont, and adding Roadster production.

Focusing Fremont on lower volumes and higher end cars to high standards night be the best result.

So perhaps in the end Fremont makes Performance Model 3/Y for US and Canada, Model S, Model X and Roadster.

Perhaps around 5-6K cars per week in total, with all cars being painted and finished to a high standard.

 

[jerry33]

So Alameda County has pressure from Elon, Mnuchin, Trump, Pelosi (just saw on Twitter, not sure if true) and many others. The state has given the go ahead for manufacturing to resume and they also have a comprehensive plan from Tesla. What exactly are they waiting for?

The temporary non-elected health official that is in sole charge of the decision has little to lose. If anything she will build a reputation for standing her ground against all comers (assuming a future employer wants those categories).

 

[Prunesquallor]

Hey guys! Guys! Look what I found!

A whole thread on *paint*!

Paint issues

 

[powertoold]

So Alameda County has pressure from Elon, Mnuchin, Trump, Pelosi (just saw on Twitter, not sure if true) and many others. The state has given the go ahead for manufacturing to resume and they also have a comprehensive plan from Tesla. What exactly are they waiting for?

They need to hire and train 2000 contact tracers per county or something lol

 

[jerry33]

Hey guys! Guys! Look what I found!

A whole thread on *paint*!

Paint issues

Where is the investment content in that thread?

 

[bkp_duke]

So Alameda County has pressure from Elon, Mnuchin, Trump, Pelosi (just saw on Twitter, not sure if true) and many others. The state has given the go ahead for manufacturing to resume and they also have a comprehensive plan from Tesla. What exactly are they waiting for?

A bribe?

 

[StealthP3D]

From the article, "Environmental compliance is another common reason for choosing to use a water-based coating."

Maybe there is more than California's regulations that have Tesla use the water-based paint. They are, after all, for the betterment of the environment first and a car company second. I would be far more surprised to learn they switch to solvent based paint if they have the availability, just to prevent a few paint inconsistencies.

Nobody uses solvent-based automotive paint anymore. It's not better either. Now can you guys who want demonstrate what you don't know about paint coatings take it to another thread please. It's like watching paint dry.

 

[joh01652]

The paint on my 2019 red model S seems perfect to me and several people have specifically complimented how the paint looks. But perhaps I was just lucky.

Yeah my 2019 3 paint looks fine to me too, but, then again, I don't go over my vehicles with a fine-toothed comb. I only get praise about how my 3 looks (although one acquaintance did confide to me that he could never buy a 3 because the front reminds him of a shark face and he has a massive phobia of sharks).

I've read plenty of noise around Tesla's paint and body panel fit, and the thing that strikes me as odd is that, personally, I don't care much if my paint has a minor ripple or a panel gap is off by a couple of millimeters. I don't look at my car that much, I just drive it.

I'm no car aficionado, and I guess if one is spending $50K+ on a vehicle it might matter to them, but as a member of "the general buying public" I couldn't really care less. I think my 3 looks fantastic, much better than the average car on the road, even better than BMW, MB, Lexus, etc.

 

[MikeC]

 

[Artful Dodger]

There were only ~180k shares sold short naked, correct? That's not nearly enough to cover delta hedging needs.

Thank you for your insight. My purpose in discussing naked shorting is identify if it is being used to drive down the SP with sudden large unexpected dumps, creating a follow-on cascade of panic selling. Look at the 'icicles' in this chart: ( @Papafox explains it well )

There are 3 obvious 'icicles' on today's chart (circled above in RED). Let's focus on the icicle at around 1:24 pm: the SP dropped $6.81 over the course of 4 min. This is about as obvious manipulation as it gets.

Then the shortzes just keep banging away until they reverse all TSLA's gains versus the macros for the day (purple line is the QQQ)

If Market Makers are participating in this naked short selling for their own proprietary trading (ie: trying to move the SP in order to save money on Friday's Options payouts, or 'Max Pain), then that is a violation of SEC regulation SHO.

Problem is, the SEC isn't minding the store. They're but a wooden Indian out front of the shop, collecting pennies in a hollow chest.

#SEC

 

[Artful Dodger]

So Alameda County has pressure from Elon, Mnuchin, Trump, Pelosi (just saw on Twitter, not sure if true) and many others. The state has given the go ahead for manufacturing to resume and they also have a comprehensive plan from Tesla. What exactly are they waiting for?

Bankwupsy, obviously.