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

[H Mak]

3 headlines from this morning's rolling business news in the Daily Telegraph. It's a tough world out there if you're not Tesla:

German car giant Volkswagen Group has cut its dividend after what Frank Witter, the company’s chief financial officer, called “one of the most challenging periods in the history of the company”.

Carmaker Renault sunk to a record net loss of €7.3bn in the first half of the year as Covid-19 devastated factories.

Pendragon, the UK’s second-biggest motor retailer, is proposing 1,800 job cuts as part of efforts to save £35m in annual costs.

 

[Buckminster]

Elon's martian scouting mission go for launch:

 

[dgodfrey]

Well, that is what all legacy OEMs say.

Our fleet CO2 average is *sugar* now but in a few short years it will be fantastic.

Your implied sarcasm could mean FCA will be needing credits for a bit longer than 2 years then.

Never the less, Ark Invest models disregard the regulatory credits and seem more bullish than ever. I suspect that the credits, while significant as we've just seen, act as a financial regulator to the balance sheet. As much as we seem to think (and it's been sourced) that Elon is indifferent to Wall Street, I believe it was critical to them to show profitability this quarter. Being able to shift the credits where and when needed is extremely convenient.

The beauty of those credits is that they can be used to balance the boat to keep it afloat. If they have an aggressive campaign requiring a large financial expenditure such as adding more Service Centers or buying a Maxwell, they can add more gold bouillon to that side of the boat as needed. If the cache of bouillon is not enough to "right the boat", slow down the growth. Maintain that equilibrium. I assume they have fairly accurate 3-6-12 month projections on all this. I could be wrong though.

 

[vikings123]

European indices have been going downhill this morning, but TSLA premarket is resilient so far (1490, -0,5%). Still being pegged to 1500?

Interesting market action so far. I find it difficult to believe shorts and manipulators have moved on. Short interest is down to 11 million shares based on Ihor’s latest tweet. There was speculation in @Papafox ’s thread that the pegging might have something to do with a secondary. Very interesting take.

Given macros are down big we usually expect to be down bigger. Volume in very low too. Let’s watch for the 8:00 EST hour to see if this breaks out to the upside or downside. If macros down and Tesla continues to be resilient we could see some interest from day traders and swing traders.

edit: It is pretty much tracking the futures, still very interesting because we usually get a 3-5X multiplier on bearish days.

 

[The Accountant]

There has been a secular trend away from active investing to passive investing, resulting in much less risk capacity to do the front running

. . . and to add perspective to your thought here: 26m shares at $1,500/shr requires $39 Billion. That's a lot of front running to put at risk.

 

[Jack6591]

Indeed, and it's amazing, but an awful lot of people incorrectly assume that the mediocre North Star (Polaris) is the brightest star in the nighttime sky.

@Curt Renz are you being Sirius?

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Tech down waiting for earnings after the bell should drag us down too. Maybe not? Hopefully the tech rebound tomorrow when they all blow out earnings with shoot TSLA back north of 1600/1700. Makes sense considering where we were last Wednesday before earnings.

 

[Nocturnal]

One point that comes to mind about passive index funds. Funds don't make profit from stock appreciation. Funds make their profit from their fees (typically quite low for passive funds).
So to the fund, share price is basically irrelevant. That's my understanding.

Yup. When I (or Uncle Bill) logs into vanguard and adds 401k money into SPY. Vanguard gets paid to sell me a slice of the market, not to make me a return.

 

[Knightshade]

None of which are official as only the manufacturers know the actual numbers. The magazines are self-selected (people can choose whether or not to report and I'd suspect most of them that choose to do so have issues).

Unless you have some reason to think that Tesla owners, specifically, would choose to self-report problems at a much higher rate than all other car brands your logic does not hold up.


Even if reporting is biased toward those with problems in general, it should be roughly similar degree of bias across brands right?

In which case Tesla having far more fit and finish problems compared to other brands in such a survey would still be a statistically valid and relevant result.

 

[humbaba]

This 20% increase in energy-density in 5 years doesn't strike me as particularly impressive, at least not for auto - might be good though for stationary storage or for supplying other manufacturers, in the meantime, Tesla can use their home-grown Roadrunner, secret-sauce batteries in their own cars to keep a healthy competitive advantage.

Maybe. But one approach to differing vehicle ranges would be to use the same number of cells with one using the higher energy density batteries and the other using lower density. In fact, this seems to be the approach in China for using locally sourced batteries that use cheaper but lower energy density chemistry. When the lower energy density gets you enough juice to maintain sufficient performance and achieve an acceptable range then using it for that case provides better margins.

While Tesla might just use the Panasonic sourced batteries for the growing energy storage market they are still so obviously constrained on the battery front and still pushing for automotive growth first that it would not surprise me if they used the mild increase in energy density of the Panasonic batteries for their "standard range" line and their own for the performance models.

 

[HG Wells]

Another Chinese EV competitor will be listed on the NASDAQ today

Symbol LI

Li Auto set to raise US$1.1 billion in Nasdaq initial public offering

 

[Mike Smith]

Computing is the new horsepower, carmaker Audi says

Watch out Tesla, Audi is going to learn computers.

 

[UkNorthampton]

Do you think delaying the elections would help or hurt Tesla ?

Trump floats delaying the 2020 election ‘until people can properly, securely and safely vote’

I think it would help Cybertruck sales and encourage watching that documentary - "Max Max" - I think it was called. Possibly "Threads" might be worth a watch too.

 

[Corey]

Fisker released a picture of their next 3 cars (a sports car, a crossover and a truck)... we'll see if they all make it to production or not.

https://twitter.com/henrikfisker

 

[SpaceCash]

20 dollar swing in 2 minutes?
Lol

Edit: I wonder how long they intend to keep things pinned near 1500

 

[dl003]

Not sure if this has been posted yet, it's pretty old.

If this didn't give the shorts chill, they must have been hella desensitized by their losses.
"Basically, Tesla is coming to Austin because we can give them the freedom to dominate."
Lately, Tesla just seems more and more out of control everyday but TSLA is held at $1,500? Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. I'm sure it will turn out to be a very happy ending for the shorts.

 

[Nocturnal]

I am amazed at how well the powers that be have been able to keep the SP right at $1500. With so many actors and forces at play it's genuinely impressive.

If you guys want a dictator pick me. I'll have ICE cars banned in the next 10 years. Also, no more pants. Those are banned too.

 

[Krugerrand]

The way I see it, as Elon focuses on transitioning to sustainable energy is that we grew too used to the PC/Mac, iOS/Android model where you have one major ecosystem and another hipster alternative.

However, there is no apparent reason that they are mutually exclusive. Tesla can very well be THE Apple AND THE Google in EV at the same time, where their have their own cars while also opening their tech/production up so that others can do their design, marketing, market focusing on their own... say a ultra luxury EV a la Rolls Royce where the interior has every bit of attention to detail in material/design while using Tesla tech underneath as it's the best EV out there.

This would make even more sense with all the gigas coming online in the future. Tesla can provide pretty much everything as its expertise in manufacturing and automation grows on a daily basis.

Already discussed.

What you say can be done, but it has no significant impact speeding up the mission, which is the whole point of EVERYTHING. It’s window dressing. It’s compliance cars. It’s noise. It’s irrelevant.

Unless a path to, ‘Here’s the technology and you can put it into the largest and lowest priced market segments and be a profitable company’ it’s a moot point.

And here’s the spoiler: Tesla can’t do that, so there’s no way the OEMs can do that having to pay Tesla for the tech or for the factory IP.

That’s the crux of the dilemma. It’s the one Elon has taken to mentioning repeatedly now: Our cars are too expensive.

So, no. This that you talk about is not worth doing. It’s a waste of every kind of resource and energy out there. It’s not going to make any difference if the world implodes while you’re driving a Rolls Royce EV or a Pinto; the world implodes and you die. End of simulation.

 

[Todd Burch]

Something seriously out of the ordinary going on with TSLA the last few days. Big spike straight up. Big spike straight down. Rinse, repeat.

 

[Cherry Wine]

Mid-BB / 20 SMA are at 1478 this morning. A level to watch.

EDIT: Bounced off this twice so far this morning. If we break down below, could get ugly.