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

[mrmage]

I don't know your specific situation obviously, but If there is a reason that you can't share details here, make sure that this reason doesn't implicate you or someone else in insider trading.

I wouldn't break NDA or do anything that's illegal or shady. I do appreciate your concern.

Can you tell us how you found these missing pieces? internal reflection? Meeting with the Musk? Installation of a Neuralink?

Internal reflection based on clues from Tesla, Musk, articles, etc. I don't have any more information than anyone else, but this forum has made it very easy to get the information.

 

[kengchang]

Yes, but the initial photo of just Elon on the video control should give all longs the warm fuzzies. He appears healthy, happy and rested.
Like someone who's come out the other side, had a good vacation and is ready to put the pedal to the floor yet again and leave competitors and FUDsters in the dust.

Elon looks fine from yesterday's streaming

 

[Huskyf]

What's going on the $TSLA go down fast any news ?

 

[LN1_Casey]

What's going on the $TSLA go down fast any news ?

Close of stock push would be my guess. Lower volume than the start of open, so easier to shove it down to negate some of the day's gains.

 

[anthonyj]

What's going on the $TSLA go down fast any news ?

Some bearish news :/ China production might start soon

Tesla could open its Shanghai Gigafactory even sooner than expected, according to a team of Wall Street analysts who just got back from China

 

[ZeApelido]

Guys I've been skeptical of FSD happening anytime soon, but I have to admit something happened that has changed my mind that it will happen in the next 2 years, I'm 101.5% confident.

Last night I had a dream. I was driving my Tesla when all of a sudden a little mouse appeared in my passenger's seat. He could speak English! He said his name was Elon Mousk. And he kind of looked like the humanoid version as well. He whispered some secrets about FSD technology in my ear, and boy oh boy you wouldn't believe what he told me!

But I can't tell you because I'm binded by a MDA (Mouse Disclosure Agreement).

Sucks to be you.








P.S. Actually he didn't whisper anything, he stuck a Neuralink device into my brain through my ear canal and said that's how Tesla is going to get the compute power for FSD.

 

[Zero CO2]

"Quite a few" in the NYC metro area is no comparison to the huge number of Teslas you would see in California. Also, he was talking about Manhattan which is mostly taxis, limos, trucks and buses, not the entire NYC area. The percent of Teslas in Manhattan is still tiny.

many of the Telsa's i am talking about are going to Manhattan... so....

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

This may be of interest to anyone who is on the fence about investing in Tesla, and also anyone who averaged TSLA at higher prices (e.g. > $300). This is not for anyone who wants assurances or proof. Treat this as one person's ramblings.

I thought autonomous FSD robotaxis would not be ready for many, many years, with only a 30% probability. I've given technical reasons for this in prior posts, and these reasons are still valid. However, I found some missing pieces to the puzzle, so I've changed my mind.

Excluding regulatory issues, I'm now confident that safe autonomy and/or a robotaxi service will be ready in the next year or two, pretty much along Elon Musk's time frame or perhaps a year longer. I have about 80% conviction in this. More importantly, I'm pretty sure of the reasons for EM being so confident about this, to the point of being smug.

However, the market will not believe autonomy or robotaxies are possible until it's obvious. This could happen end of this year or the next, but it will happen when Tesla decides to reveal their hand. Until then, there may be better entry points. With all the shorts, there might even be better entry points for a short while after it's obvious, just like the delayed run up after deliveries last quarter.

I've doubled my position in TSLA today and intend to invest substantially more over the next month. The timing is bad because Tesla is up due to other positive news, but +/- 30% in the short term won't matter if I'm right.

The bad news: I can't share details. So why post this at all?

1. Correcting my past posts
2. Giving back what I can
3. "I told you so" rights

Disclaimer: This is absolutely not investment advice.

I can't imagine that your insight is so convincing, that it would rally TMC and propagate to be known fact in markets/industry. Only in that case I can see that it would somehow disadvantage Tesla.
Your theory, whether true or not, will be just one more crazy theory on the Internet, so feel free to share; otherwise your statement looks, at best, unconvincing...

 

[humbaba]

I wouldn't break NDA or do anything that's illegal or shady. I do appreciate your concern.



Internal reflection based on clues from Tesla, Musk, articles, etc. I don't have any more information than anyone else, but this forum has made it very easy to get the information.

If it is the result of internal reflections on public information... why can you not share?

I can understand if it just boils down to "gut" but if you really have any public information that backs up your certainty I'm quite interested. I do try to keep up with FSD, though I admit I've fallen behind on Waymo (there may, or may not, be more information since the last time I checked). And I've not seen anything persuasive about Tesla FSD being ready in Elon's time frame. What I can pick out as positives:

+ Autonomy day was apparently impressive
+ Advanced Summon for Aug 15
+ Claims that parking lot is harder than roads
+ Its dangerous to bet against Elon
+ Musk has made it clear that FSD is a priority

But there are certainly negative indicators:

- Autopilot seems to have picked up regional behavior (uneven performance elsewhere)
- Elon has claimed Advanced Summon was about to be released how many times?
- Parking lot claims are hand waving and ignore complexities required for roads
- Elon tends to optimism
- No outside indication that some issues for FSD have even been acknowledged

I think that, if Tesla was willing to take shortcuts, they could likely achieve robotaxi under certain conditions in the near future. But I don't think they are willing to take those shortcuts, and in point of fact have repeatedly stated that they are not, and will not do so.

Without more information it looks like you prefer the positive to negative indicators. You might be right, but there doesn't seem to be a solid basis for it.

 

[jerry33]

But there are certainly negative indicators:.

- Autopilot seems to have picked up regional behavior (uneven performance elsewhere)
This might just indicate that there is more information (cases) coming from some areas than others. Not all areas have the same edge cases, or even non-edge cases.

- Elon has claimed Advanced Summon was about to be released how many times?
True. I suspect Tesla has some of the same ground floor to ceiling communications issues that other large companies do.
However, I would hate to be the person who said we are on track when we weren't.

- Parking lot claims are hand waving and ignore complexities required for roads
??

- Elon tends to optimism
True, but he has a history of getting there eventually, even if it's not on the timeline originally planned. Sometimes when he gets there, it's way better than the original expectations. If he was pessimistic, there would be no Tesla or SpaceX.

- No outside indication that some issues for FSD have even been acknowledged
No reason to tip your hat prematurely.

Now I'm not saying the OP actually has any information that can be relied on. But as you say, betting against Elon doesn't have very good odds.

 

[ReflexFunds]

“Our China team ́s view of Tesla ́s ability to ramp domestic production and to take commercial share in the domestic Chinese market is more bullish than the forecast implied within our earnings model. We have allowed for a greater level of execution risk in our assumptions, given the complexity of bringing an all new plant with all new workers and many new suppliers on line within the Chinese market.”

Other noteworthy intel:
- The construction of GF3 tracks perfectly on schedule as to last week and aims to be ready by end of Sept.
- SKD/CKD (Semi Knocked Down/Completely Knocked Down) production will kick start from November, but is expected to have rather limited impact on the 330k units of M3 forecast (globally) to suppliers this year
- Tesla is in talks with local battery maker Tianjin Lishen and also LG Chem for collaboration for fully localized models from 2H20.

Ignoring AJ's idiotic opinions/agenda, one interesting note here was the 330k units of M3 forecast to suppliers this year. I wouldn't give much trust to his intel, but it seems this number has come from somewhere. If Tesla is really targeting production of 330k Model 3s this year with minimal production at GF3, this would suggest a 2H19 weekly average Model 3 production of 7.5k per week - which would imply to me Tesla is in the process of ramping to 8k M3 per week at Fremont.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

Ignoring AJ's idiotic opinions/agenda, one interesting note here was the 330k units of M3 forecast to suppliers this year. I wouldn't give much trust to his intel, but it seems this number has come from somewhere. If Tesla is really targeting production of 330k Model 3s this year with minimal production at GF3, this would suggest a 2H19 weekly average Model 3 production of 7.5k per week - which would imply to me Tesla is in the process of ramping to 8k M3 per week at Fremont.

I'm keeping with my hunch of Q3 guidance of 115,000-125,000 vehicles produced

 

[BLSmith2112]

I thought autonomous FSD robotaxis would not be ready for many, many years, with only a 30% probability. I've given technical reasons for this in prior posts, and these reasons are still valid. However, I found some missing pieces to the puzzle, so I've changed my mind.

As to the reason of why you changed your mind:

Internal reflection based on clues from Tesla, Musk, articles, etc. I don't have any more information than anyone else, but this forum has made it very easy to get the information.

So why post this at all?

1. Correcting my past posts
2. Giving back what I can
3. "I told you so" rights

1. What specific line item are you correcting? You won't say.
2. What are you giving back? Based on the (public) evidence that changed your mind, you've refused to give anything but a change of opinion.
3. You haven't told us anything to be able to say "I told you so," other than change your mind and refuse to state why.

To me your comments are akin to putting the mechanical rabbit (your supposed FSD revelations) out in front greyhound racers (TMC community) and saying you know how to catch it but no one else can. It's an unnecessary tease.

 

[ZeApelido]

If it is the result of internal reflections on public information... why can you not share?

I can understand if it just boils down to "gut" but if you really have any public information that backs up your certainty I'm quite interested. I do try to keep up with FSD, though I admit I've fallen behind on Waymo (there may, or may not, be more information since the last time I checked). And I've not seen anything persuasive about Tesla FSD being ready in Elon's time frame. What I can pick out as positives:

+ Autonomy day was apparently impressive
+ Advanced Summon for Aug 15
+ Claims that parking lot is harder than roads
+ Its dangerous to bet against Elon
+ Musk has made it clear that FSD is a priority

But there are certainly negative indicators:

- Autopilot seems to have picked up regional behavior (uneven performance elsewhere)
- Elon has claimed Advanced Summon was about to be released how many times?
- Parking lot claims are hand waving and ignore complexities required for roads
- Elon tends to optimism
- No outside indication that some issues for FSD have even been acknowledged

I think that, if Tesla was willing to take shortcuts, they could likely achieve robotaxi under certain conditions in the near future. But I don't think they are willing to take those shortcuts, and in point of fact have repeatedly stated that they are not, and will not do so.

Without more information it looks like you prefer the positive to negative indicators. You might be right, but there doesn't seem to be a solid basis for it.

I will tell you what he is thinking.

He is thinking that Musk has laid out a Trojan Horse.

This lies around the ridiculous estimates of Advanced Summon. We keep thinking of Advanced Summon as some parking lot gimmick.

Meanwhile elsewhere, researchers note that the complexity of handling the driving environment is actually inversely proportional to the speed limit. Faster speed limits mean more controlled environments. Parking lots, therefore, are actually the most complicated environments to manage.

When they solve parking lots and release Enhanced Summon, they are actually laying out proof that they will finish FSD. That's the Trojan Horse.

Elon's comedic timelines of Enhanced Summon (always just a few weeks away) is part of this Trojan Horse, so no one is really taking him seriously (on Enhanced Summon, not his FSD claims).

My superoptimistic guess - Musk unveils full production of FSD capable Model Y's and the market absolutely sugars themselves.

 

[heltok]

I think FSD progress has been stalled mainly due to regulatory issues for AKNET_V9 style networks on HW3. Once that happens in in Q4 2019 I expect we will see Autonomy-day-like performance for everyone with FSD.

Twitter

They have worked very hard on getting HW3 ready, now it’s out. They worked hard on getting software for HW3 with old networks ready, now it’s done. They have been training FSD control semi-ready since nov 2016 and the new vision network architecture has been semi-ready for like a year. Now they just need to change visoin-NN(seems trivial), get new control system into master branch(probably almost done, see andrews videos) and wait for regulatory approval.

Since 2016 they have been iterating their software 2.0 stack, their dataset and everything else in between. I assume that their developer branch system by now are very much closer to being complete than it was in 2016. Now they have 5more months to fine tune everything before it goes out to customers and then to make complex intersections and parking lot perform near-optimally given current sensor suite(which is superhuman). This seems like a much smaller task than
1. Develop HW3
2. Make custom compiler for HW3
3. Set up Software 2.0 stack and team etiquette

Let’s not forget what an monumental progress this has been so far. Finally they have everything except regulatory approval for HW3-NN which seems much more predictable if plausible or not than 1, 2 and 3.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

What's going on the $TSLA go down fast any news ?

Many stocks took a dive at the end of trading, even more than TSLA. Look at AAPL. Some short term upward trend lines were broken. Nothing big I think.

 

[mrmage]

If it is the result of internal reflections on public information... why can you not share?

I can understand if it just boils down to "gut" but if you really have any public information that backs up your certainty I'm quite interested. I do try to keep up with FSD, though I admit I've fallen behind on Waymo (there may, or may not, be more information since the last time I checked). And I've not seen anything persuasive about Tesla FSD being ready in Elon's time frame. What I can pick out as positives:

I used public information to arrive at my conclusion, but haven't seen anyone else figure it out. I'm almost positive that Tesla has, and if so, EM has good reason for not revealing it. So I won't either, because it's detrimental to Tesla.

I'm not out to change anyone's mind. If you think EM is sketchy or overoptimistic, you still will without more details. But if you believe that EM could be right, I'll confirm that Tesla has a fast track to autonomy.

 

[humbaba]

I will tell you what he is thinking.

He is thinking that Musk has laid out a Trojan Horse.

This lies around the ridiculous estimates of Advanced Summon. We keep thinking of Advanced Summon as some parking lot gimmick.

Meanwhile elsewhere, researchers note that the complexity of handling the driving environment is actually inversely proportional to the speed limit. Faster speed limits mean more controlled environments. Parking lots, therefore, are actually the most complicated environments to manage.

When they solve parking lots and release Enhanced Summon, they are actually laying out proof that they will finish FSD. That's the Trojan Horse.

Elon's comedic timelines of Enhanced Summon (always just a few weeks away) is part of this Trojan Horse, so no one is really taking him seriously (on Enhanced Summon, not his FSD claims).

My superoptimistic guess - Musk unveils full production of FSD capable Model Y's and the market absolutely sugars themselves.

Ah... so the unsubstantiated, hand waving claim about parking lots being more difficult. Yeah, sounds like an academic rather than an engineer. Academics are important and can have significant insights, but the problem space is somewhat orthogonal. Navigating a parking lot is not the same as driving on roads -- there are entirely different constraints. And saying it is inversely proportional to speed is silly in a "makes sense if you only consider it superficially" sorta way. There's nothing inherent about driving 80mph that makes the problem "less complex", but because of the realities of response time, braking distance, etc., for safety roads are engineered to have less complexity when they are designed for high speed.

But lets say he is correct about the relationship where complexity is inversely proportional, it only accounts for the overlap and says absolutely nothing about the difficulty in improvement. Nor does complexity necessarily tell you anything about the difficulty. That's like saying the average is comparable to the standard deviation.

In the end, just silly hand waving.

[edited to add: just as a point about difficulty vs complexity: making a turn is certainly not difficult, its a matter of controlling the steering wheel angle. Greater speed increases the uncertainty of future states with the same time delta -- that makes it more difficult to achieve high accuracy predictions. Which, in turn, are necessary to determine what the steering wheel angle should be. While momentum helps with improving trajectory plots there are limits (e.g., braking, acceleration, too sharp of a turn causing instability, etc.) that doesn't help with pothole detection and avoidance, curve maintenance, etc.]

 

[Artful Dodger]

What's going on the $TSLA go down fast any news ?

Not just TSLA. Macros collapsed in last hour. MAGA* stocks all did the same plonk (including after-hrs)

* plus, MFST AAPL GOOGL AMZN

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Not just TSLA. Macros collapsed in last hour. MAGA* stocks all did the same plonk (including after-hrs)

View attachment 430842
* plus, MFST AAPL GOOGL AMZN

Perhaps general market uncertainty due to "likely" vote on impeachment? Various news articles in the last ~hour mentioning this might happen "today". Though it sounds like no matter what happens, chances are nothing happens. (either it gets tabled, killing it, or it gets sent to committee, which doesn't have to do anything about it so it could just be ignored - and since Dem "leadership" doesn't want to impeach and most of the Republicans don't want to either, chances are no matter what outcome on the vote, it won't go anywhere)