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

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Indeed. If you pay attention to what Chanos is saying (no, not the FUD BS "thesis", just the facts about his own TSLA short position and their policy about it) in the two separate interview segments and then connect the dots, you can come to the following conclusions:

  1. Chanos has already covered about 90% of their initial TSLA short position
  2. They have already lost so much money on TSLA shorting that they can never recover, even if Tesla were to bankrupt tomorrow
Let's see how we arrive to these conclusions:
  • As far as I know from earlier appearances on CNBC etc, Chanos had a "max short" position already around $200 SP.
  • In the first segment in the above video from April, Chanos stated they are still "max short" at $470s and explains that is 5% of their fund as that is the max allowed in a single position by their rules
  • In the later (this week) segment he explains, they are still short but only within the rules of their fund, explains when the price hikes up they must trim their position to stay within the 5%.
  • So, if they shorted ~$200 and now the price is over $2000 and they keep trimming to stay within 5%, that means they already had to cover over 90% of their short!
  • That covering just from the 400s to now required them to pay more than twice the price for 80% of the position between 400-2000, therefore they had to lose more than 1.6x the money they got from the short sale. So even if Tesla goes bankrupt and they can cover their remaining 10% shorts at zero cost, they are still forever deep in the red!
TLDR: Chanos has already lost more money than he could ever make back on shorting TSLA and he already covered most (~90%) of his shorts, so his position is rather insignificant now.
How do we know how much Chanos really lost shorting?? Are we trusting what he SAID he did or is it on public record somewhere?
 
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Majority of midclass workers are living paycheck to paycheck, they cannot tolerate even a 1% decrease in their investment portfolio.

I have seen -40% on my first TSLA investment when it went from $305 to $170. If someone can’t accept losing up to 50% the day after they buy, TSLA is not for them.
I'm someone who rode NVDA down from around 280 down to around 120 during the bitcoin crash back in 2018, because Nvidia and AMD video cards were heavily used to mine that trash and there was a short-term sales collapse when people stopped buying video cards to mine with. Since then NVDA has recovered and is now around it's current ATH of 510.

I'm prepared for TSLA to crater all the way back down to 400 if need be. I have my hedges in place, you can't kill me with a 50% decline in share value over what ended up being nothing, because I've already been there. And that was before TSLA's Corvid flash crash back in March, all the people who panic sold that crash are kicking themselves now. You'll pry these shares from my cold, dead hands!
 
Update: I stopped by yesterday at the Electrify America chargers at the local Walmart. Unfortunately the guy working there had just finished hiding the Tesla logo on the batteries installed there. You can still see the Tesla red. He said they aren't "Powerpacks" but they are Tesla BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems).

He said they hide the Tesla logo because Electrify America (VW) doesn't want to publicize the fact they are using Tesla batteries. He said they are doing this "all over the place". The goal is 400 locations by year's end. I think he meant across the US.

He's from the NYC area, 150 miles from here. He was driving a Black Model S with chrome delete. I didn't get a pic.

View attachment 581443 View attachment 581444

So Volkswagen cheats with the emissions of their VW, Audi etc. cars. A big scandal - and rightly so.
As punishment/retribution VW America has to make charging stations for Zero Emission Vehicles.
In order to do that properly they buy 400+ BESS products from Tesla.

And this is in addition to the regulatory credits FCA already buys from Tesla?

I knew that Fiat Chrysler have been paying for Tesla to grow their market share. But now the Volkswagen Group is also financing Tesla's expansion?

Fiat, Chrysler, Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche are paying for the new factories their fastest growing competitor is building?


How abso-bloody-lutely brilliant!

:D
 
So from a quick Google, a power pack costs 172k. Multiplied by 400 is 68m. Tastes sweeter when it's coming from VW.
Even better, money coming from a VW diesel emission-cheating penalty.

FD055E93-CA8F-4F3C-8CB2-E7BC1FDFDA82.jpeg


Edit: as pointed out by @Christine600 :D
 
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TSLA will go in history book, No other stock in history of US market where retail investor made more money than any other stock, Thanks to amplified vision of Elon Musk.

I don't think that is true, yet. Obviously there are larger market cap companies that have created more wealth for investors collectively that Tesla, and there are also other companies with smaller market caps that have had higher percentage returns than Tesla.

Maybe one day though.
 
Your original thesis that TSLA could stay down for years like AMZN is reasoning by analogy, not first principles....
I'm not saying that because it happened to Amazon it will happen to Tesla. I'm saying that a multi-year depression of TSLA's stock price could happen...
That's what I said you said, as you can see above.

...and pointing out that something pretty similar happened to Amazon under rather similar market perception conditions.

Henry Blodget told a story about Amazon's CFO, Joy Covey, after she tragically died in a car to bicycle accident :

"By 1998, when I picked up coverage, Amazon was already a big success story, and Joy had become a celebrity in the Internet analyst community. When Joy got on the phone that night, she was, once again, terse and polite. She was also livid.
My new price target had triggered another spike in Amazon’s stock price, and for the first time in my experience as analyst, a company was angry about that.
Amazon’s spiking stock price, Joy explained, was causing problems at the company. It was distracting employees, who were spending their days obsessing about the stock price instead of Amazon’s customers. It was making recruiting difficult, because Amazon stock options were losing their attractiveness to would-be employees as the stock shot ever higher. It was focusing the press on the stock when Amazon wanted the focus to be on Amazon. It was, in short, making everything all about the short term, when Amazon’s whole business strategy and philosophy were about the long term.
I protested to Joy that I had merely said what I had thought we both agreed on — that Amazon was a great business that would be worth a whole lot of money some day.
“Yes,” I remember Joy saying. “Someday. But now all anyone is thinking about is today.”
Joy Covey, 1963-2013

Again, this is reasoning by analogy. Do you have evidence that TSLA's runup is distracting Tesla employees, or hurting Tesla's recruiting, or distracting the press from Tesla's achievements? Until you do, your quote has dubious relevance to Tesla.

Also I agree with others that a profitable company 10 years after IPO (Tesla) is not facing "rather similar market perception conditions" as an unprofitable company 3 years after IPO (Amazon).

Thank you for the debate.
 
Just curious, the green spike on the far right is what, calls bought by shorts to limit losses in case of a spike-squeeze? And then what's the red spike on the far left all about? Kinda crazy to hold puts at 180 strike.

Ceiling and floor effect. Plus contracts that far out of the money are super cheap, so people are able to buy a greater absolute number of them.
 
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I think it would be wise for everyone to pay attention to how well the Renault Zoe is doing, in terms of how important it is that Tesla consider making a small hatch for Europe ASAP.

Edit: In fact, there might be an argument that the 2nd stage in Berlin factory should be for a hatch rather than the model 3.
 
How do we know how much Chanos really lost shorting?? Are we trusting what he SAID he did or is it on public record somewhere?

We don't really know how much he lost. As far as I know there is no reporting requirement for shorts, so there is no public record to go on. We can only speculate based on what he said. My speculation was assuming that he covered all the "trimming" needed between 400 and 2000 at the lowest possible price ($400) and that super-conservative estimate yields that he lost 160% of his shorting money already. The reality is probably much higher, on the other end of the spectrum it could be as much as 900% loss so far. The actual number will be somewhere between 160% and 900% and only he and his fund employees would know for sure.

All this is based on information he volunteered to disclose. If that information is not accurate we would not know. He might not be telling the truth. He might be secretly long TSLA ;)
 
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TSLA will go in history book, No other stock in history of US market where retail investor made more money than any other stock, Thanks to amplified vision of Elon Musk.
The stock which has actually made more money for a retail investor who bought at IPO than any other in history is Microsoft, and it's a record that Tesla would have a long way to go before it could surpass.
 
Again, this is reasoning by analogy. Do you have evidence that TSLA's runup is distracting Tesla employees, or hurting Tesla's recruiting, or distracting the press from Tesla's achievements? Until you do, your quote has dubious relevance to Tesla.

Also I agree with others that a profitable company 10 years after IPO (Tesla) is not facing "rather similar market perception conditions" as an unprofitable company 3 years after IPO (Amazon).

Thank you for the debate.

Your reasoning is misguided and heavily flawed and you really need to stop trying to put words into people's mouths. If you can't understand that bringing up a similar situation is helpful but not conclusive, then nothing I say will get you off your high horse. That you further think that Tesla's additional years of establishment will prevent it from crashing should a black swan even occurs is baseless.

The Blodget quote was simply a point of interest. I said NOTHING about it being analogous to Tesla. But at this point it's clear you're just looking for things to attack.
 
I'm someone who rode NVDA down from around 280 down to around 120 during the bitcoin crash back in 2018, because Nvidia and AMD video cards were heavily used to mine that trash and there was a short-term sales collapse when people stopped buying video cards to mine with. Since then NVDA has recovered and is now around it's current ATH of 510.

I'm prepared for TSLA to crater all the way back down to 400 if need be. I have my hedges in place, you can't kill me with a 50% decline in share value over what ended up being nothing, because I've already been there. And that was before TSLA's Corvid flash crash back in March, all the people who panic sold that crash are kicking themselves now. You'll pry these shares from my cold, dead hands!

Well, according to some here, you have NOTHING to worry about with that happening to TSLA. The stock is immune from such sustained declines since it's been around more than 10 years and Amazon was only 3.

Oh, what's that? Nvidia suffered a multi-year decline in its stock after being around for 25 years? That's completely different and can't happen to TSLA. Tesla is only like the good parts of being a tech company, not the bad parts.
 
Oh, what's that? Nvidia suffered a multi-year decline in its stock after being around for 25 years? That's completely different and can't happen to TSLA. Tesla is only like the good parts of being a tech company, not the bad parts.

The bad part related to the Nvidia decline was just mentioned in a separate post above. People were buying video cards like crazy to mine Bitcoin. Until the economics of mining changed, and that market vanished, like, overnight.

So, if a comparable Black Swan even were to happen to Tesla, it would be what? A sustained pandemic that closed factories and shut down travel worldwide? Oh, not even that would do it, you say? What then? Across the world, roads suddenly evaporate?