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

[EVMeister]

How the hell can they both have identical handles and account names??

Anyway, explains a lot! Cheers!!

TesIa looks strangely like Tesla. The difference is that one has an upper case 'i' instead of an 'l' (lower case 'L').

 

[Artful Dodger]

Spotted on Twitter: (is Vincent on TMC?)

Vincent‏ @vincent13031925 7h7 hours ago

1/ June 17th 2019, Tesla (China) car purchase & finance department officially announced, with Pudong Development Bank, consumers can now purchase Tesla cars with 0% interest up to 60 months on selected models. Demand will increase dramatically.

2/ This is the 2nd time for two parties work together again in the consumer finance sector following the successful launch of the first syndicated loan for the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory project by the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank in March this year.

3/ Tesla's sales in the Chinese market have steadily increased, and its customers mainly cover developed areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Jiangsu And Zhejiang.

4/ The success of this consumer staging business is also a favorable policy for Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Shanghai Branch to settle in Shanghai with the Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory GF3 China​

Putting this into the record here in text format so it is searchable (can be found) months or years from now.

Cheers!

 

[anon]

Looks like Musk is back on Twitter - as well as changing his picture as noted by someone else, he deleted the Tweet about deleting his Twitter account.

 

[sixela]

Do you mean that all unassigned VINs showed as available for immediate sale from inventory on the Tesla site (and also ev-cpo.com, which makes it easier to view), even though there were already customers for those configurations waiting to be matched?

That is most definitely how it looked. For a couple of hours we could even order any car assigned to a Delivery Centre and not yet matched anywhere in Europe in the Belgium page, so we could pick from thousands of cars. That was clearly an error. IIRC, from some messages, some people in the Netherlands who actually managed to "order" German cars that matched their order were then told that wouldn't work. Then some hours later everything disappeared and the cars were then "spread" over several delivery centres and you could only pick your local ones. Some people trying to "order" these were still contacted with a message saying these cars were not really available anymore...

Now on my page there are just 8 grey and one black car left. All AWD LR, which makes sense since the price of RWD LR made most customers pick these instead, until they announced on the 12th they would no longer accept RWD LR orders even off-menu.

I hadn't imagined that they would do that,

At least the first change appears to have been a really large "oops".

 

[Pras]

Looks like Musk is back on Twitter - as well as changing his picture as noted by someone else, he deleted the Tweet about deleting his Twitter account.

The funny thing is that media will now write another article that Musk deleted his “deleted” tweet.

 

[Fact Checking]

Anyway, I'm really hoping the shorts are feeling some pressure right now as the stock is rising and that they start getting forced out. I don't believe a true short squeeze is possible (as has been discussed at length) but I do believe some will be forced out of the stock which will give TSLA a bit of a lift.

BTW., the Millennial and Generation-Z Tesla investor base (Robinhood users holding TSLA) is still expanding, $50 from the bottom:

# Robintrack (TSLA)

Which is pretty amazing IMO. ~170k users holding is a new absolute record. If the average held position is similar to E-Trade and around ~30-50 shares then that's a total position of 5-8m TSLA shares, they are one of the largest "institutional" holders of Tesla now.

 

[Fact Checking]

That is most definitely how it looked. For a couple of hours we could even order any car assigned to a Delivery Centre and not yet matched anywhere in Europe in the Belgium page, so we could pick from thousands of cars. That was clearly an error. I

BTW., has anyone recorded exactly how many cars were listed, and what was the date of this? They probably exposed their whole new car inventory for Europe - which would set a rough ceiling for Q2 European deliveries.

 

[AlexS]

That's the real Teslacharts. The fake Teslacharts has still blocked you

TeslaCharts (@TesIaCharts) | Twitter

TeslaCharts (@TeslaCharts) | Twitter

View attachment 420540

haha that fooled me, using I instead of l

 

[Todd Burch]

Tesla is a high beta stock, sure, but a 8x move (in relation to NASDAQ) is a little much to write off as TSLA mirroring the market. I made this same case last week, but I now think the broader market increase is only a part of the rise. With that said, if the market tanks on Wednesday because the Fed doesn't cut rates then I think we're primed to give some of this increase back. Just my 0.02.

TSLA didn't match NASDAQ yesterday, I agree.

But it had similar movement to several FAANG stocks (FB +4.24%, NFLX +3.21%).

 

[urarthur]

Elon said something important during the shareholder's meeting but everyone seemed to have missed it.

He literally said "production has been great!"

Everyone was so focused on deliveries/no demand, that they missed it. This was the first time he was so positive on production. No bottlenecks, no production hell, no nothing.


edit: exact quote was production has been pretty good.

 

[Xenius]

Spotted on Twitter: (is Vincent on TMC?)

View attachment 420545

Not fair, I want to refinance my loans at 0% too! I mean, the 1.49% is close, but not ZERO.

 

[Fact Checking]

TSLA didn't match NASDAQ yesterday, I agree.

But it had similar movement to several FAANG stocks (FB +4.24%, NFLX +3.21%).

BTW., it's good if TSLA correlates with high-tech stocks and not with auto stocks.

One of the Wall Street bearish analyst dirty tricks is to put Tesla into the automotive sector and value it like stagnant ICE companies with 5-10% margins, zero growth, no real EV offerings and burdened by the largely unquantifiable costs of the looming ICE collapse that Norway, China and California is already showing.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

230 in premarket. Not bad. I'll be happy if it holds onto that gain all day. Slow and steady climb is my preference to the gymnastics.

 

[Fact Checking]

Elon said something important during the shareholder's meeting but everyone seemed to have missed it.

He literally said "production has been great!"

Everyone was so focused on deliveries/no demand, that they missed it. This was the first time he was so positive on production. No bottlenecks, no production hell, no nothing.

I noticed!!

So I went back and here's what Elon said about Q2:

[timestamp 33:00]

"[Q2] sales have far exceeded production, and production has been pretty good, so we're actually doing doing well, and we have a decent shot at a record quarter on every level, [...] if not it's gonna be very close, [...] we've got a shot at a record quarter, and 90% of orders are coming from non reservation holders, so these are new customers."

[timestamp 69:40]

"we feel good about demand, that's you know I think not a major issue the profitability is always challenging if you're a fast growing company and I think that the scale at which Tesla is growing is like hard to appreciate but last year we we doubled our fleet like so we made as many cars last year as we had in our entire history and this year you know it's gonna be like pretty like similar at least sort of sixty to eighty percent growth of the total vehicle fleet made more than that so it so it's hard to be profitable with that level of growth we could slow down but then that would not be good for sustainability and the cause of electric vehicles and and solar and storage [...] so you know I think we can be cashflow positive despite having a very high growth rate."
​

Note that there's several levels of new information there that I haven't seen reported together yet:

• Q2 is still guided as non-GAAP profitable, which should reduce the chances of a surprise $250m+ profit triggering S&P 500 inclusion.
  
• Note the "sales have far exceeded production" wording. That's not the wording you'd use with poor demand and Tesla just limping along.
  
• Q1'19 S+X production was only 14k units, and it was an open question whether Tesla could still do 25k/quarter production after the layoffs, reduction in production and the change to Raven. If Elon included S+X in his remark then this would suggest that they can do 20k+ production and maybe 20k deliveries in Q1, which would be huge and would remove much of the cash and GAAP income drain that the S+X drop caused in Q1. I still think S+X production not quite at the Q2'2018 level of ~24k is still in the cards for Q2.
  
• Record at every level would I think normally also imply record revenue. If this verifies then record production, deliveries and revenue in Q2 would falsify all the TSLAQ talking points rather forcefully.
• 90% of demand is now organic, not pent-up demand from reservation holders. This was expected by everyone who looked at the huge reservation queue - but again this is huge if we can see it actually verified in practice as well.

I suspect this wording and JB's presence and good mood is what is behind much of the after-market bump yesterday, and the strong pre-market performance of TSLA today (so far).

Also, the exact quote is "production has been pretty good", not "production has been great", and if you re-watch the statement you'll see a slight pause before the "pretty good", which to me suggests that it was a deliberate statement, with the subtext that they are still cell constrained, but there's no additional bottleneck on the Tesla production side.

 

[MTL_HABS1909]

Not fair, I want to refinance my loans at 0% too! I mean, the 1.49% is close, but not ZERO.

Much better than the 4.14% I got....

 

[S3XY]

Most of his recent retweets are of bulls. I'm confused. I thought I was looking at the wrong account. Maybe he has capitulated.

It seems as though the market manipulators may be switching their bets to take advantage of a run up. Once there they will switch back and turn up the FUD. Rinse. Repeat.

 

[sixela]

BTW., has anyone recorded exactly how many cars were listed, and what was the date of this? They probably exposed their whole new car inventory for Europe - which would set a rough ceiling for Q2 European deliveries.

I had though about that, but unfortunately they realised their mistake before I could actually catch it, and only showed me the "Belgian" cars after that. Then there were, as I said, a lot of RWD LR but these disappeared in a couple of days, so they must have been matched mainly to existing orders (unless they had really good sales that week ;-) ).

which would set a rough ceiling for Q2 European deliveries.

Not sure -- I'm pretty sure that any VIN already assigned or delivered was not visible in that list. Looking at the timing and forum messages from people watching for VINs in the source code of their web pages, the Great Assigner in the Fremont Sky was busy assigning cars from one ship nearing Zeebrugge, so it would just have given you a floor on the number of cars with unassigned VINs on that ship at that moment plus the unsold inventory from earlier ships already in Europe -- perhaps not that useful.

If the number of cars visible creeps up again, I guess that will be from unassigned cars traveling on the Grand Mark which they might still try to lob your way in June, but perhaps they'll be a bit more prudent for these.

 

[Fact Checking]

Alex Roy has bought a Tesla and has just published a very entertaining article about it on The Drive:

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Buy A Tesla

"Are you out of your f***ing mind?" said journalist Ed Niedermeyer, whose name is allegedly painted above the drain of the replica Duchamp hidden in Elon Musk's private bathroom at Tesla's Fremont factory."

"I'm buying a Tesla," I said, "and nothing you say can stop me."

"Maybe you should read my book."

"That definitely won't stop me."​

Alex Roy - Wikipedia

Ed Niedermayer is the infamous "Tesla death watch" guy, the first ever TSLAQ creature and propagandist.

Alex Roy also documents how carmakers are bribing auto journalists:

The truth was that I'd been talking to Tesla higher ups for months, alternatively promising to buy new and threatening to buy used. They'd never offered anything other than best wishes, which made conceding Ed's point a whole lot easier. However much a dark part of me hoped for a discount and a specially prepped car, I'd have to order one like every other shlub. But calling in manufacturer favors is what other people do. You know them; those auto "journalists" with nary an unkind word for a car until its model cycle is over.

Me? I've got a reputation to uphold.​

And:

If one doesn't give a s**t about the promises, lies, idiots, trolls, fools, rumors, hopes or exaggerations, all that's left is the glorious reality of the one fact that remains: the cars are amazing, delightful, stunning and unique.​

 

[Tslynk67]

haha that fooled me, using I instead of l

Sneaky f*cker!

 

[Artful Dodger]

BTW., the Millennial and Generation-Z Tesla investor base (Robinhood users holding TSLA) is still expanding, $50 from the bottom:

# Robintrack (TSLA)

Robintrack provides a CSV file with hourly TLSA holdings.

The number of Robinhood users holding TSLA reached an all-time peak yesterday of 169,938 at 10:43 EDT, then fell by 992 net holders by the close of the regular session.

Wisdom of the crowd indicates there was some small amount of profit taking yesterday, with the vast majority continuing to hold.

Cheers!