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

[traxila]

I love optics as much as the next modern media observer but the reality is S/X sales have dramatically collapsed in the wake of the 3 and they needed to refresh those models yesterday and short term stock price movements don't change this reality.

I'm still following my plan, I want to divest a large portion of my stake at the earliest feasible opportunity.

What if they sell a helluva lot more of the 3? Isn’t this the car the company was created for?

The S and X will continue to sell at a lower rate. But does the 3 continue to explode into the Y? Tell me why this should not happen. The 3 is the best BEV value on the market. It has no competition in its class or price range. Please tell me when it will have direct BEV competition.

What about Tesla energy? You do not see tremendous growth about to pop there?

Will the Y not also be best in class value for a considerable period of time? How about long enough for that S and X refresh everyone wants? Why would the legacies not fear a refreshed S and X with all the best BEV technologies at prices they cannot match? How about the next generation 3?

What about this rumor I have been hearing about some fancy self driving stuff? Does that factor in anywhere?

Funny, think I missed some stuff, but let’s stick to mass revenue drivers.

Unless you are trading in which case do your best! Always works better if you do.

 

[UnknownSoldier]

What if they sell a helluva lot more of the 3? Isn’t this the car the company was created for?

The S and X will continue to sell at a lower rate. But does the 3 continue to explode into the Y? Tell me why this should not happen. The 3 is the best BEV value on the market. It has no competition in its class or price range. Please tell me when it will have direct BEV competition.

What about Tesla energy? You do not see tremendous growth about to pop there?

Will the Y not also be best in class value for a considerable period of time? How about long enough for that S and X refresh everyone wants? Why would the legacies not fear a refreshed S and X with all the best BEV technologies at prices they cannot match? How about the next generation 3?

What about this rumor I have been hearing about some fancy self driving stuff? Does that factor in anywhere?

Funny, think I missed some stuff, but let’s stick to mass revenue drivers.

Unless you are trading in which case do your best! Always works better if you do.

I should have been trading the last 2 years yes. Sell when it goes over $300, buy when it goes back to $260. I would have a made a mint now. Holding long on a stock that trades heavily on sentiment is a sucker's game and I've been a sucker. I intend to sell most of my stake and trade in and out instead of letting it just sit there doing nothing while the market keeps going up.

 

[Todd Burch]

Of course you misunderestimate the IRS. Proceeds (positive) are taxable. Losses (negative) are not claimable.

Of course I meant that losses deduct from your income for tax purposes.

 

[Fact Checking]

Yes, one of the first questions I had was - how are they collecting edge cases. Are those disengagements or some other feedback from the cars ?

Firstly, Tesla isn't telling much about this - and they shouldn't, they are the industry leader who has various proprietary secrets to protect.

But I got the impression that they have two main methods of data collection: on Autopilot disengagements, and also they have filter conditions they are sending out to the fleet. So if say Andrej Karpathy is interested in disengagement events about "tunnels", they might have the methods to get only such events from the 100 cars a day that disengage around tunnels, not millions of disengagement events per day.

When I say larger data sets help - I'm talking about 1M vs 10M. In both cases you have to figure out how to identify edge cases in an automated way, anyway.

I believe Tesla's labeled image database must be in the millions - perhaps hundreds of millions of images, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was above a billion images.

They are not doing stereoscopic vision the usual way, instead their networks recognize 3D perspective patterns in 2D frames and to turn them into distance and perhaps object attitude (object movement vector) attributes. So their networks can, in essence, do things like:

Note that these are actually processed 2D images of cars, which the neural network recognized as 3D cars and the output is rotated by the neural network itself. I.e. after training the network you can input "144°" rotation as an input parameter, and you'll get a rotated car generated by the neural network.

So the GIFs above are not real photos of cars, they are the generated output of the trained neural network and a camera/view position parameter.

See this:

"HoloGAN: Unsupervised learning of 3D representations from natural images"

Thu Nguyen Phuoc - Work​

This is pretty close to how the visual cortex in the human brain is working I believe. This is how we can see in 3D just fine even with a single eye.

 

[traxila]

I should have been trading the last 2 years yes. Sell when it goes over $300, buy when it goes back to $260. I would have a made a mint now. Holding long on a stock that trades heavily on sentiment is a sucker's game and I've been a sucker. I intend to sell most of my stake and trade in and out instead of letting it just sit there doing nothing while the market keeps going up.

Past performance does not indicate future price trends. Do not strategize while looking in the rear view mirror. Do not trade on yesterday’s news.

Wish you all the best!

 

[⚡️ELECTROMAN⚡️]

I should have been trading the last 2 years yes. Sell when it goes over $300, buy when it goes back to $260. I would have a made a mint now. Holding long on a stock that trades heavily on sentiment is a sucker's game and I've been a sucker. I intend to sell most of my stake and trade in and out instead of letting it just sit there doing nothing while the market keeps going up.

Now that the Model 3 is here and it is resounding success and TSLA is as volatile as ever, it’s clear you’re a fool not to swing trade this stock. This will probably just make it even more volatile and profitable to swing trade.

 

[SarahsDad]

Nicely written article over on Marketwatch critical of Tesla Bears..

Tesla bears are now making crazy claims, short-circuiting their cause

 

[Motor Mouth]

I should have been trading the last 2 years yes. Sell when it goes over $300, buy when it goes back to $260. I would have a made a mint now. Holding long on a stock that trades heavily on sentiment is a sucker's game and I've been a sucker. I intend to sell most of my stake and trade in and out instead of letting it just sit there doing nothing while the market keeps going up.

Best of luck to you, but be careful.

 

[X Fan]

Here is what I posted on our local group's Facebook page.

Good morning Tesla friends! Just got back from a short drive to try out the new 8.5 Nav on Autopilot update. Short response...this seems to be a fully function complete FSD for highway use. Very impressed. That said, some very interesting observations.

First some background. I was on the highway in moderate traffic with light rain (but with the spray from the traffic I am sure the system thought it was much heavier). I had the driver acknowledge turn lane turned off and the turn lane notification set to both wheel vibration and chime. In the future I will probably turn off the chime but each to his/her own. I also set it to automatically default to "no acknowledgement on each trip' so any time I put in a destination it will automatically go to these settings. There are other options.

First off, it seems the system would not engage without first acknowledging the driver presence, aka torque on the wheel. It wouldn't engage for me the first time I tried for this reason and gave me a red prompt to put my hands on the wheel. Very smart I think.

Next, the on ramp performance seems MUCH more confident. My exit is a two lane on ramp and it smoothly accelerated and moved over one lane then did the same to enter the highway flow of traffic. MUCH BETTER!

Next thing I noticed was that it seems to require the same "driver presence" verification before performing any lane changes. In other words, it would signal but would not move over until my hands were on the wheel. Again, I think this is very smart on Tesla's part. Keeps people from abusing the system I think.

Next thing I noticed was that it appears to be more sensitive to poor weather. It went from Nav on Autopilot to regular Autopilot three times during my trip for this reason. Each time it would re-engage when the rain let up or when traffic cleared out and there wasn't as much spray. Lane changes were all smooth and confident. It would wait for an opening and then smoothly accelerate into the new lane. It would then return to the right lane to get out of the passing lane much more readily I think than before.

Overall, on this short trip, I was blown away. Can't wait to try it on dry roads and a longer trip. Sorry for the lenghy post but thought some of you might be interested. Of course, everyone will have different opinions, but I think this is a BIG step forward for the system. Can't wait to see what Hardware v.3 has to offer when the time comes.

Hope that helps.

Great report. On another OP, there was a more muddled picture.

The driver complained by saying all Tesla has done is to replace the nag.

Prior: you have to engage the small stalk.

New version: you have to exert pressure (and as many of us know, often the system doesn’t recognize properly that you are holding the steering wheel).

 

[SunCatcher]

other automakers : there seems to be a lot of demand for EVs. Let's build one. How hard can it be?

"Getting in the electric car market, and going against Elon Musk... everybody's talking a lot of $hit... it's not as easy as he makes it look."
Jack Rickards

 

[mickey6]

"Getting in the electric car market, and going against Elon Musk... everybody's talking a lot of $hit... it's not as easy as he makes it look."
Jack Rickards

Also I feel, most manufacturing are thinking, "if we can't beat tesla, make life hell for them to survive". Part of me says, shorts, ICE manufacturers etc are all in the same bed. I wish there are one or more of other electric only car manufacturers that do well. Competition will open this up

 

[Todd Burch]

Glad I got back in today. Makes me feel less sick to my stomach .

 

[AndyH]

Top gear experiencing a day as Tesla fans. Love the conclusion at the end:

"When you hear the man himself talk about the struggles he went through building this company from nothing to where it is today and all in just 10 years. Well that's really quite remarkable."

 

[anthonyj]

Me rn with the September calls I bought yesterday (sold some stock tho)

 

[Freder Reeve]

that surge
Robintrack

 

[Buddyroe]

All this talk about the SEC and the judge. Does all that REALLY matter if there is not enough demand to sustain Tesla short or long term?

I don't know why we're even talking about the SEC case when Tesla's deliveries were down 31%.

Yes, I'm scared. Now I know why Tesla was cutting prices and playing games with the announcement of the $35k car (looks like another attempt to bring people in and then hope they'd just go ahead and buy a more expensive model), and cut prices by thousands of dollars on inventory cars. I was hoping the Model S price cut was due to a new model coming out (whether a refresh or longer range), but in reality it was a desperate attempt to sell cars and get the deliveries up.

With all the games, Tesla could only muster up 63,000 deliveries. And even if you add the 10k in transit, that's a pitiful 73,000. Why will this get better next quarter? Or the next?

Someone tell me something to make me feel better. I'm a ball of gloom right now.

 

[KarenRei]

All this talk about the SEC and the judge. Does all that REALLY matter if there is not enough demand to sustain Tesla short or long term?

Oh please. Don't talk to me about "demand problems" when many of us on this forum, including me, can't buy any model at all. And nearly half of the people on this forum are at best only allowed to buy the highest-end models.

If you want to confuse delivery problems with "demand problems", don't do it in front of people who aren't allowed to give Tesla their money.

Yeah, Tesla screwed up. Deliveries got started way later in Europe than they thought they were going to have to. Causing them to have to suddenly switch gears to domestic late (too late) in the quarter - after having gutted their domestic delivery infrastructure they didn't think they were going to need in order to save money. That doesn't suddenly transform into a "demand problem" when demand in W. Europe + Scandinavia, and probably China (although it's a black box, so who the heck knows) didn't even come close to being saturated in Q1 just for the highest-end models alone. Here we are only five days in April and Norway is already up to half its all-time record April deliveries, just on residual inventory without the "delivery volunteers", of only AWD and P - vehicles with tens of thousands of dollars in profit on them at average sales prices. But oh no, "demand problem"!

Demand problem my arse. Sorry. #ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney

 

[NicoV]

China is not a democracy. Tesla is now in good standing but that could change due to a change in leadership or priorities. China's leaders can do what they want with no recourse. I'm happy about GF3, but Tesla should be careful about unnecessary exposure.



Amazon has this only from someone who recorded it off the air. Too bad, I'd like to see it.



How does it make sense to clean them at Zeebrugge before trucking them to the delivery location, usually in another nation?

They could have cleaned the inside of my car, it was delivered with dried up muddy footsteps in the trunk. Don’t know how those got there!

 

[Swampgator]

All this talk about the SEC and the judge. Does all that REALLY matter if there is not enough demand to sustain Tesla short or long term?

I don't know why we're even talking about the SEC case when Tesla's deliveries were down 31%.

Yes, I'm scared. Now I know why Tesla was cutting prices and playing games with the announcement of the $35k car (looks like another attempt to bring people in and then hope they'd just go ahead and buy a more expensive model), and cut prices by thousands of dollars on inventory cars. I was hoping the Model S price cut was due to a new model coming out (whether a refresh or longer range), but in reality it was a desperate attempt to sell cars and get the deliveries up.

With all the games, Tesla could only muster up 63,000 deliveries. And even if you add the 10k in transit, that's a pitiful 73,000. Why will this get better next quarter? Or the next?

Someone tell me something to make me feel better. I'm a ball of gloom right now.

Tesla sales were up 110% YOY in Q1. That is the fact.
ALL automakers sales go down Q1 vs Q4 prior.
Tesla is not an exception.
BMW sales flat YOY Q1
Mercedes down YOY
Want me to keep going or do you feel better already?

The Numbers: 2019 Hasn't Been Good for Car and SUV Sales So Far

 

[Buddyroe]

Tesla sales were up 110% YOY in Q1. That is the fact.
ALL automakers sales go down Q1 vs Q4 prior.
Tesla is not an exception.
BMW sales flat YOY Q1
Mercedes down YOY
Want me to keep going or do you feel better already?

Whose sales were down 31% from last quarter besides Tesla? Flat? Hell, I'd have jumped through hoops for flat. You're trying to make me feel better?

And Tesla has a relatively new model out that was supposed to have 400,000 deposits. How many have they sold......200,000 and suddenly no one wants one? WTH?

What will be the ongoing demand for the 3 in the U.S.? Globally? I sure don't see anything close to the 1 million Musk claimed.

Heck, Tesla had to slow down their production lines this quarter - we went from production hell to demand hell overnight.