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

[Radpioneer]

Rights issue, you mean? Please do feel free to communicate it to Musk & Tesla.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE... Sounds like a great idea

 

[Dylan]

SP is going to continue to drop, maybe even into low 200's if you ask me. All the news that supposed to be positive (or less "negative) has been published and there's nothing to look out for a while now.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Don't think they will do cap raise until Q2 ER at the earliest in order to show that they can do higher prod, demand isn't an issue, and FCF and profit are back on the upward trajectory. There's no need for the money until Q3 at the earliest(debt payment of like 500 million I think and prob costs associated with the ramp at Giga 3 and Model Y parts orders). I am still very opposed to a cap raise at this price level. Should do a cap raise at anything under 300/share, otherwise find more debt to use.

 

[izemize]

RHD next week:

Elon Musk on Twitter

Is this good news or bad?

 

[KSilver2000]

And what about those of us who bought in at $300-$350 years ago. Yeah, it does suck. But I'm sure it will be worth it in the end.

Don’t want to rub salt on the wound, but you didn’t sell any after Musk’s $420 instance? That was one of the best, if not the best, trading opportunity with TSLA in the past few years.

 

[bdy0627]

IV is going up again, as you would expect when the SP falls.

Ah, thank you. It really must have spiked up in our fall below $250.

 

[sparcs]

The big problem is that there isn't a lot to counter this until the Q2 earnings report. Three month wait. Maybe two months if they at least meet their delivery guidance.

Pickup truck is going to be treated like Model Y reveal and Autonomy Investor Day since there's no immediate impact for Tesla. FUD is probably going to hit peak insanity and the media doesn't care enough to correct it.

Wildcard is maybe FSD, but it's hard to imagine significant software updates in the short term that show at least parity with Waymo and Cruise (even though they are rigging their system with lidar, HD mapping, and geofencing)

 

[MP3Mike]

Regarding Panasonic building 2170 capacity in Japan, this concerns me because it means they don't see a clear route to optimizing the already installed capacity at GF1. One issue may be finding enough quality workers in Nevada. GF expansion must have soaked up a large portion of the work force already.

Unless that battery capacity is to supply the Shanghai Gigafactory.

 

[jerry33]

SP is going to continue to drop, maybe even into low 200's if you ask me. All the news that supposed to be positive (or less "negative) has been published and there's nothing to look out for a while now.

Not true. The SEC hasn't been published yet.

 

[copyhacker]

They did that somewhat on purpose: to get everyone used to how hydrogen fuel cell cars would look(this is also why Toyota has the same styling).

Interesting. Do you have a source for that? I always wondered if it was conscious or unconscious EV backlash (“Hey greenies! Look at my giant air-breathing grille!”).

 

[Anstandswauwau]

SP is going to continue to drop, maybe even into low 200's if you ask me. All the news that supposed to be positive (or less "negative) has been published and there's nothing to look out for a while now.

Talking about dry powder, eeeehh

 

[kengchang]

Except the original plan was to keep increasing capacity at GF1. This is a change.

It's more cost effective to convert existing line to make 2170 cells, Panasonic probably prefer that since it's lower risk.

 

[bdy0627]

Is this good news or bad?

Everything is bad news today!

 

[ZeApelido]

Tesla: Why Did The Autonomy Vehicle Day Turn Me Bullish? - Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) | Seeking Alpha

 

[elasalle]

RHD next week:

Elon Musk on Twitter

Hope deliveries are not for this quarter though .. any changes to production lines could impact 90-100K target
but SP might have responded a bit due to this.

 

[jerry33]

Interesting. Do you have a source for that? I always wondered if it was conscious or unconscious EV backlash (“Hey greenies! Look at my giant air-breathing grille!”).

Other than that Toyota has always disliked BEVs and that their hydrogen car has a similar grill, no.

 

[Causalien]

Since it has not broken this pattern, it'll probably spend the rest of the month in the 240s & 250s....

The wedge continues down. $240 is a pretty strong support. After that with enough pressure from the channel we will see $220 sometime. The stock will go back to the previous range bound channel before model 3 and we see $200 to $250. Discounting any benefit from model 3 for now.

By the way, I hope Elon is now more receptive to suggestions after being humbled by this.

One of the things I want to suggest after seeing the FSD demo is to be nicer to employees you perceive as stupid. And less quick at pointing out their failures in front of others.

 

[Anstandswauwau]

Is this good news or bad?

Depends on if you're long or short.

 

[kbM3]

First, car insurance is a short-cycle business with minimal float. Second, use of proceeds is highly regulated. Using premiums to build factories or whatever is a fantasy.


I don't believe this is literally true - i.e. they aren't ahead of October 2018 because they've shipped cars overseas which won't be delivered in April. That said, eliminating the wave would take them from a 10/15/75% monthly pattern to something like 30/30/40. First two months will obviously be higher, last month much lower. That's the whole point - to improve efficiency by smoothing things out.


20% gross margin for Model 3 does not mean 20% gross margin for each variant. COGS for a $60k P are only 4-5k higher than COGS for a 40k SR+. (The difference is even less if you believe Musk's $100/kWh). I put COGS at ~40k for SR+ and ~45k for AWD/P. A base SR+ with no options thus has 0% margin, fortunately most people pay up for color, wheels and/or /FSD.

How do you arrive at that COGS? Didn’t they just specify $50k ASP and ~20% GM?

The cell supply issues from Panasonic are pretty scary -- this was supposed to be resolved several quarters ago -- but yes, they account for the bulk of the collapse in profit, since Tesla could not make the number of Euro/China cars it was supposed to during Jan and Feb. Add in delivery failures which shoved even more Euro/China deliveries from Q1 to Q2, and it gets worse. The fixed costs don't change, but the marginal profits which are supposed to cover them aren't there if you don't ship enough units.

For S & X, there was clearly some drop in demand (perhaps just the tax credit cliffs in US and, was it the Netherlands?), but an awful lot of it seems to have been the planned line changeover. And there seem to have been Euro/China delivery problems again. It looks to me like the line changeover took longer than it was supposed to.

As far as I am concerned, the biggest miss in recent quarters that Tesla has given up on 10K/week out of Fremont. That was truly bad news and the drop from $360 to $250 is partly justified by that. Getting only 5K/week in Q1 rather than the new target of 7K/week was also bad news and accounts for more of the drop. Our resident institutional investor says that his sources say that production is going up so the battery cell bottleneck hopefully really is fixed.

But essentially the bad news was in the delivery report; the earnings report has a lot of goofy wildcard stuff going on which doesn't matter (they do seem to have thrown in the kitchen sink) but the bulk of the loss is from just not making enough cars. IMO.

My understanding was that 10k/week in Fremont was based on 2 lines of 5k each.

Since then, they’ve gotten more speed so they can achieve 7k / week / line, plus they’ve moved up GF Shanghai.

Seems like a net positive to me?

 

[PhaseWhite]

Those who have followed my posts in this thread know I've been a long time advocate for a capital raise. I think they should doit now with a sense of urgency and it better be equity, or some other non debt approach like a strategic partnership.

The thing Elon doesn't seem to understand from his TSLA stock/house analogy he gave on the conference call, the one about the stock price being a distraction and likening it to people yelling different prices at your house all day. Is that first of all it's not his house, it belongs to the shareholders, second the value of the house is important because it is not just a place to live but represents an asset that the companies operations and compensation are leveraged to.

The price of Tesla's equity was based upon an assumption that it would grow really fast. By starving Tesla of capital Musk has had to slow down that growth. He claimed he has not, but then why are we seeing so much drama recently? To my eyes, everything is explainable through the lens of Tesla being short on cash thus feeling an urgency to make rash changes versus being able to take a more measured approach.

Now that Musk's realized that he might need more capital it will cost Tesla and it's shareholders a lot more. This has been a predictable outcome from the start, and if I could see it, why couldn't Musk or the board?