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

[EVNow]

And the Bolivian Constitution limits Presidents to two terms.

So, Bloomberg should have been forced to quit and seek asylum ? Supreme court extended term limits last year.

Anyway, this is not the politics forum. Wanted to post it here since few read the politics forum and wanted them to know what people are going to be saying.

 

[capster]

My 2cents. I was part of a massive selloff after a huge runup in another domain and sat and sold for hours every day for about a month, all day looking and red and green numbers flashing through the screen like The Matrix.

While it is hard to unload huge amounts without crashing the market, understand that it’s not a team effort, it is short vs short and long vs long when it comes to unloading.

As a medium whale you can keep track of the bigger whales, but in the end it’s a few percent gain for a lot of lost sleep if you really try to be greedy. (Fwiw I tried to be greedy, next time I will probably be less greedy.) If you have a position of say $1M you want to cover you might aswell get it over with in one day, do 10 sell walls 0.1% above last trade of $100k spaced out randomly over the day, if not filled within 5minutes move the sell wall. If it is $100M you might do it in week and crash the market a percent or two. Often you look for a buy wall on the other side and just eat that wall, crash the market 0.1-0.5% which it recovers the second after your order but at least you can go back to drinking margaritas. There are some bots making some percent profit for trades inbetween the walls, but they also compete with each other driving down margins.*

The bigger players often hire people to do the selling for them over a time, often these people just supervise a bot doing it for them. It can be a scripted bot they just sells 10shares/second, sure you lose a litte margin to bots trying to exploit you, but the bots will compete for the profit so telegraphing your strategy is not really that expensive.


My take on current short interest. Shorts have been covering. This has likely caused and also been caused by the raise in the share prices. I would guess that this trend will continue, but also that this is already priced in. With more shorts covering, S&P buying there will also be a lot of people selling just waiting to do this until S&P inclusion.


People disagree on the future value of TSLA, we place our bets and see who was right. I love this game! Some shorts still believe that Tesla is not and never will be profitable. Some longs believe that Tesla is and will be profitable. Imo it is wise to not place total confidence in your beliefs, I believe that Tesla very likely is profitable, would be very surprised if Tesla has managed to cook the books. But I could be wrong, I have been wrong before and will be wrong again. But I am happy that there is a big disagreement, that means that there is a chance to make money if you are right and I’d like to think that I am a long term winning player in the guessing game.



*For some periods in time the market has been seriously broken, see Flash Boys

I appreciate the insight from your experience. It is always good to hear real war stories.

No doubt about it, there is covering, but I think less than many believe. I would be surprised if all that many professional shorts just folded at this juncture without trying to kick the can down the road using the tricks we have seen discussed here many times. Also, I suspect managing a massive selloff has some differences from managing massive covers, but I don't have any experience to back that up.

Now that I've been watching things unfold in the market around TSLA for a few years, I'm starting to have some notions about more short-term developments (as opposed to the long term outlook, where I’ve been bullish AF for years ). Maybe not to the level that I would be willing to put any money on that (lol), but at least to the level that I'm willing to share my thinking in hopes of receiving thoughtful feedback such as yours.

 

[dc_h]

True but in this case the customer is going to have to buy a steerable phased array sat dish receiver that has custom chips designed by tesla and that will keep the pentagon out as a client until the security is checked out. That leaves Telco's and HNWs ships, commercial ships, etc as clients. Not a huge market but they'll need to get 1000 up so as to have coverage over target latitudes 20-40. Then they add capacity to attract more customers.

They'll have to get that receiver costs way down though. It might be better but if that box costs too much (and that is a pricey bitch right now) it will prevent adoption.

I think the pentagon is likely to be the first client, even if just a 100 million pilot program. The DOD will want to know how encryption is handled on the chip and in memory. I think they’ll do better then a carrier solution and be NIST compliant. This is huge for all the branches. I wouldn’t be surprised if SpaceX and the military find a way to sneak a few hundred observation devices in with the regular devices.
The consumer market is easy and huge. For a global company though, this would be awesome. Providing a single network provider. Sell this as a backbone to Azure and companies like Zoom and Ring Central. This could be the AWS of networking. If Elon wanted to truly give some deep deep love to the shorts he’d combine Spacex and Tesla once starlink is up and monetized at 100 billion. He’d own ~40% of the combined companies and have insane cash flow. I’ve never thought a merger would happen and probably not going to happen, but SpaceX is going to be very valuable and I’d like to own some shares.

 

[pz1975]

have I mentioned that I have too much time on my hands?

No it’s just you.

 

[jbih]

MobilEye demonstration of their FSD solution driving in a complex environment in the city.

"Vision only, no lidar, radar, just 360 degrees vision camera sensors, that's it."

 

[jschwefel]

MobilEye demonstration of their FSD solution driving in a complex environment in the city.

"Vision only, no lidar, radar, just 360 degrees vision camera sensors, that's it."

Looks very impressive! Anxious to experience it myself. Where can I get one?

 

[jbih]

Looks very impressive! Anxious to experience it myself. Where can I get one?

"Mobileye today reaffirmed that it’s on track to launch a robo-taxi service in Tel Aviv by 2022 and is collaborating with RATP Group (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens) to deploy autonomous vehicles elsewhere."

Mobileye partners with NIO to develop driverless cars

 

[TradingInvest]

It's true that short shares get hurt when price go up. Remember shorts bought a lot of TSLA Put options a while back. They were sure TSLA would bankrupt or at lest drop to single digit. So their loss is more than just short shares.

 

[S3XY]

MobilEye demonstration of their FSD solution driving in a complex environment in the city.

"Vision only, no lidar, radar, just 360 degrees vision camera sensors, that's it."

That looked pretty impressive but there sure were a lot of edits. I'd be very interested in seeing the full raw footage.

 

[ZeApelido]

A relative and friend recently took a lengthy motorbike trip through South America and reported that Peru is a miserable place.

Is your relative's name Evo?

 

[heltok]

Also, I suspect managing a massive selloff has some differences from managing massive covers, but I don't have any experience to back that up.

Citron covering or Tencent buying is not that different in theory. They have some decided amount of share that needs to be bought, some time frame and some sensitivity to swings. But the strategies are pretty much the same. Same with someone new whale shorting or Elon deleveraging(which will happen at some point).

I split up the work into four different parts
1. Gather information
2. Process/information
3. Make a decision
4. Trade

Step number 4 is the trading game we are talking about. Here we don’t really care about why, we only care about how. Everyone one of us will at some point buy and sell for some reason, once we decide to it no longer matters why we reached that point, it’s just how we best do this sell/buy to get in/out at the best price.

 

[graphilwar]

Interesting perspective on the auto industry, especially where he talks about the Time to Equity indicator he developed to predict auto industry new car sales, his opinions on Ford/GM/FCA-Chrysler...

 

[printf42]

It's true that short shares get hurt when price go up. Remember shorts bought a lot of TSLA Put options a while back. They were sure TSLA would bankrupt or at lest drop to single digit. So their loss is more than just short shares.

This makes me suspect the Twitter TSLAQ crowd are secretly longs, they know Tesla is not going anywhere and sold sugar load of bankruptcy puts to whoever believed their BS.

 

[SteveG3]

Latest NASDAQ short interest data just got released:

Date       TSLA shares short
10/31/2019 31,784,407
10/15/2019 37,186,793
 9/30/2019 36,058,919
 9/13/2019 38,883,688

On Oct 31 (when TSLA closed at $315) only about 5.3m shares were covered - which is a surprisingly slow rate of short covering 6 full trading days after Q3 earnings. Only 15% of the shorts covered on the jump from $254 to $315, 85% were still holding out.

From the $178 low in June this is a cumulative loss of 4.3 billion dollars in position value in just 5 months - that's going to hurt the trading power of the current shorts and reduce the influence they have on the stock price.

Ihor estimated 30.6m on October 31 - so his guess was off by about 1 million shares, but he got the magnitude of the move right.

I.e. the rally wasn't a short squeeze - 90%+ of the post Q3 buying was by new Tesla investors (!).

Personally I'm not unhappy that the Tesla shorts are this tenacious: may their journey be long, and may their losses be deep.

Since I started following Tesla in mid-2012 the short position has almost always been in the low 20 percent area or higher.

The massive move from ~$40 to ~$180 over 4 months in 2013? Low point of short position was about 18%.



As has been said here for years, I'd be surprised if the short position (and the interconnected misinformation campaign) doesn't really substantially fade until about 2022 at the earliest.

If a +300% move in the stock over 4 months in 2013 didn't change anything much, why would a +24% move over a few days have a meaningful impact?

Of course, there are some with short positions who probably sweated both moves. I think most likely, they are just innocent bystanders making up a small portion of the at least 7 year long massive outlier sized Tesla short position (perhaps historically unprecedented).

The bulk of that massive short position... as said here for years, sure looks like a pocket change investment in trying to extend the life of the fossil fuel economy by slowing down the transition to sustainable energy.

I will be delighted if I'm mistaken about this, but, I do not see either the massive short position or the massive misinformation campaign cut down to size for years.

On a practical level, I think it helps to be prepared mentally for this, so as to reduce frustration over the next round of misinformation and irrational price dipping.

 

[TradingInvest]

This makes me suspect the Twitter TSLAQ crowd are secretly longs, they know Tesla is not going anywhere and sold sugar load of bankruptcy puts to whoever believed their BS.

Whoever created that Twitter block list to block all Tesla fans is a genius. We may never know what's his real intention. It hurts the shorts for sure.

 

[StealthP3D]

Definitely off-topic, but I actually measured Gali at 3 words per second, exactly twice that of Jack Rickard of EVTV (1.5 wps)

That explains why I watch Gali at regular speed and Jack Rickard at 2X.

 

[Paracelsus]

Peru has just a few more things going for it than Bolivia that have significantly helped increase the standard of living there, some of which even the Spanish conquistadors were aware of............like 1,500 miles of coastline along some of the richest fishing grounds in the world fed by the cold Humboldt currents that contributes to Peru providing 10% of the worlds ocean catch and a huge shipping port (Lima) to operate from, the 5th largest producing gold mines that lured the Spanish in the first place, and some of the most amazing archaeology sites on the planet (Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu, Chan Chan, the Nazca Lines, Unesco World Heritage advertisement, etc) that now have more gold visiting them in the form of tourism than the Spanish carried away. I have spent a considerable amount of time in Peru with a backpack on a couple trips, and will never grow tired of Peru.........but I am feeling squeezed by the ever-growing tourism industry that is a huge part of Peru's economy, and schedule to avoid the Disneyland-like crowds at so many places across the country. There are over a million more people per year that visit Machu Picchu now than the first time I visited, and there are now 500 people per day on the Inca Trail. How different Bolivia would be if it Machu Picchu and an ocean! That said, m next trip will include Puma Punku and Tiwanaku in Bolivia.

But now that the World is recognizing peak oil is real and that the Old Paradigm is now being disrupted by EV's, Bolivia as a Lithium producer is unfortunately probably ripe for a little bit of 'outside influence' on its government. Didn't Iran have a democratically elected Prime Minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh that was overthrown by 'outside influences' about the time the world realized how much oil was there?

 

[Intl Professor]

Peru has just a few more things going for it than Bolivia that have significantly helped increase the standard of living there, some of which even the Spanish conquistadors were aware of............like 1,500 miles of coastline along some of the richest fishing grounds in the world fed by the cold Humboldt currents that contributes to Peru providing 10% of the worlds ocean catch and a huge shipping port (Lima) to operate from, the 5th largest producing gold mines that lured the Spanish in the first place, and some of the most amazing archaeology sites on the planet (Cuzco, Sacsayhuaman, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu, Chan Chan, the Nazca Lines, Unesco World Heritage advertisement, etc) that now have more gold visiting them in the form of tourism than the Spanish carried away. I have spent a considerable amount of time in Peru with a backpack on a couple trips, and will never grow tired of Peru.........but I am feeling squeezed by the ever-growing tourism industry that is a huge part of Peru's economy, and schedule to avoid the Disneyland-like crowds at so many places across the country. There are over a million more people per year that visit Machu Picchu now than the first time I visited, and there are now 500 people per day on the Inca Trail. How different Bolivia would be if it Machu Picchu and an ocean! That said, m next trip will include Puma Punku and Tiwanaku in Bolivia.

But now that the World is recognizing peak oil is real and that the Old Paradigm is now being disrupted by EV's, Bolivia as a Lithium producer is unfortunately probably ripe for a little bit of 'outside influence' on its government. Didn't Iran have a democratically elected Prime Minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh that was overthrown by 'outside influences' about the time the world realized how much oil was there?

Churchill recognized it earlier when he was First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I.

 

[AudubonB]

STOP.

 

[Tslynk67]

OT before pre-market... I decided that the proceeds of my bet with Whitney Tilson would be used for Kiva micro-loan funding, and he sent me a Kiva gift certificate for this yesterday. Some needy people going to get some help.

For those that don't know it www.kiva.org

Thanks Whitney!