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

[computerchuck]

To win in the stock market, you must have lithium testicles.

Mine are made of the cathode material nickel, due to its high polish finish. It's almost mirror like.

 

[aubreymcfato]

The entire market for NN training is not even in the hundreds of millions currently. But Tesla may have a 4x advantage over other providers with its chip and research into linking them together in a cluster. Tesla can use this advantage for huge margins, or drop the cost and increase size of the market. Tesla may spin this by providing more tools that make this accessible to more people. But here is where it gets interesting. Neural computing (and regular AWS style services) have huge electrical costs. And for companies like Amazon they are 'pass through' costs. Not for Tesla. That can be another vertically integrated item, Tesla Energy providing the power. Other suppliers NN training will in the end pay more for power.

Oh wait, it gets better. Neural training is a non-real time activity that draws lots of power. So it can be used for load shifting. Who else would be prepared to turn off and on this demand autonomously to generate more profit? Only Tesla. There could be a time where autobidder can sell power at 50x the normal rate. Turn off Dojo and reap profits. Or times when power is free or even negative cost... Fire up Dojo at maximum. Tesla could possibly get Dojo to turn down and up usage as fast as a battery too. So it could possibly be used for FCAS as well.

Small addendum to this amazing post: NN training has a huge environmental impact¹. A new infrastructure for machine learning that does not burn fossil fuel to run has a massive impact on global CO2 emissions. So it's good news.

[1] Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes

 

[lafrisbee]

And I got news for you, the average American is going to see EV's as less of a success due to the BS Harley Davidson Electric motorcycle "Documentary," and Asshat Trevor. Those two have created headwind for EV adoption.

 

[traxila]

I find these "Man the battle stations, it is the end of the Quarter" emails by Musk to be out of character. I believed the first one, but another one? Like the workforce doesn't understand what time of the quarter it is?
And there is no real reason to "possibly break the record for quarter production and/or deliveries"? That is an artificial goal. A milestone should be recognised in terms of quantity needed for financial reasons, or measurable improvement in the quality of the product.
His email is NOT "First Principles" based. It's fake at its core.
It leads an outsider to consider the Tesla workforce to be viewed as unprofessional by Elon Musk.
And I don't like it.

Don’t have enough information for good opinion.

How often does Musk email the employees company wide?

 

[EVMeister]

I'm not much of a trader, but I have been making use of both sides of the swings we've been having lately. Just with a few shares, for fun (and the little bit of money gained doesn't hurt, either).

 

[Kenypowa]

Yes I watched the first 3 episodes over the weekend. At the time of filming, HD was still very much in near production prototype as well with the Livewire. It seems like a nice bike but that range is pretty bad. I was kind of curious as to why they didn't look at Zero as an option (maybe they did?). Zero has a bike that does better range. Maybe it's not suited to the conditions?

I sort of wonder if them doing this to help push for adaptation of EVs actually sets us back more. As you said, some great charging porn but they've already just run out of juice in the middle of nowhere and even had to bring in diesel gens to deliver the type power the Rivian and HD require. I feel like this creates a rather negative impression of EV ownership (I guess in South America it is pretty negative!).

Side note. I'm a huge fan of the original Long Way Round (which inspired me to get a motorcycle license). In the original LWR which was filmed in 2004, they biked through central Asia, Russia, Mongolia and Siberia and many places are without any road (asphalt is a rare sight) and without cell phone reception. It was a rough journey so it was a natural part of the show to the obstacles they faced throughout.

Amazing show but it's not available on Netflix or Prime but it is on YouTube or Dailymotion. I highly recommend to watch the original before watching the new series.

 

[Nocturnal]

I don't know about you guys but I prefer us to be flat going into battery day anyway.

And I got news for you, the average American is going to see EV's as less of a success due to the BS Harley Davidson Electric motorcycle "Documentary," and Asshat Trevor. Those two have created headwind for EV adoption.

An electric Harley is a stupid idea anyway. People buy those to go slow and be loud and annoying AF. An EV bike is the opposite of that.

 

[bubb]

And I got news for you, the average American is going to see EV's as less of a success due to the BS Harley Davidson Electric motorcycle "Documentary," and Asshat Trevor. Those two have created headwind for EV adoption.

Lots to be frustrated with there for sure, but I'm optimistic that TSLA will bring the hammer down on batteries and (in the long run) make the choice obvious for many, many more people.

 

[mikevbf]

Speaking of typical manipulations, here is the "buy the rumor, sell the news" manipulation explained really well by a long time TMCer Dave Lee:

 

[UkNorthampton]

In layman's terms, can you very briefly describe, in the most broad and basic terms, a specific (simple) example of this. For example, what type of existing business might make good use of it, what the data going in might look like and what the output might look like? I assume the data going in would be from a database?

For Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Data - a supermarket wants to predict ice cream sales/deliveries/orders. In a place like the UK with 4 weathers a day and no climate, it can take a wide set of data, school holidays, weather, previous sales, promotions, supplier responsiveness, warehouse stock and capacity, and decide how many mint choc ices to buy. Multiply that by a few thousand items and it's a difficult task for humans and even conventional systems.

It might be better suited to AI (powered by Tesla). If the AI is in Tesla cloud, so might the data be.

Other uses, medicine creation, medicine mixing problems, DNA, vaccines, traffic, finance bots.

 

[Todd Burch]

Mine are made of nickel, due to their high polish finish. It's almost mirror like.

All nickel should go toward battery production. You know what you need to do.

 

[Krugerrand]

When did they promise to "eliminate the wave", i.e. stop this facade of dressing up quarterly numbers by pushing all sales to end of quarter by producing long shipping time cars early in the quarter and local ones last ? This puts a lot of strain on logistics, makes end of quarter deliveries crazy, hectic, lots of bad customer experiences in addition to stressing out employees.


Edit: Oh look I found some references, turns out I did not just imagine this wave ending / unwinding stuff:
Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable
"Assuming Q2 is the start of the elimination of the wave, these discounts will hopefully go away. In other words, Tesla will hopefully be shifting to a model where quarterly boundaries are invisible to the behavior of the company. A great thing longer term.

In short, the wave approach was stupid stupid stupid all around, and Elon should have eliminated it long ago. Good riddens."

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable
"The wave is bad business, but it produces prettier quarterly numbers."

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable
"They are unwinding the wave deliveries for Model 3."

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable
"When they start shipping even in M3, we know they are serious about ending the wave."

Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the 2019-2020 Investors' Roundtable

Guess, it is not yet end of 2019, because they still did not manage to "introduce fully continuous deliveries", eh ?

Meh.

 

[StarFoxisDown!]

I don't know about you guys but I prefer us to be flat going into battery day anyway.

I could really care less if we rally or drop into Battery Day.......but I do like the fact that there was a bear raid on stop losses today. Probably a good number of speculators bought into the stock last week and put tight stop losses on their shares in case Battery Day disappoint. I'm somewhat satisfied that they got wiped out before the actual event got here

 

[Krugerrand]

Shanghai is on a 10 day shutdown. Fremont is all they have.

Edit:
"Please consider vehicle deliveries to be absolute top priority. It's also extremely important that we keep factory output as high as possible over the remaining 10 days. This is vital for the California market."

Why read the words when it’s more fun to make stuff up and panic.

 

[hobbes]

Recent activity 10 hours ago

Elon's tweet: "Yes."

Electrick Headline:

"Tesla to bring new Roadster to Nürburgring racetrack next year as production remains unclear"

O.k. my mistake, thought this was about email to employees for end-of-quarter push.

 

[mikevbf]

All nickel should go toward battery production. You know what you need to do.

Speaking of Battery Materials which is probably Tesla's biggest bottleneck to growth due to its 5-7 year lead times to bring on new production, you might want to upvote my SAY battery materials question:
Say
I'm not sure when they close voting on SAY questions. 24her before the event? same day as event? Anyone know?

 

[Robocop]

Tomorrow: Are we to assume the shareholder meeting will be its typical length of ~2 hours? That would put the start of battery day proper at post-3:30pm pacific. Curious as I'll be busy at work and can't watch live, but may be finished by the time the shareholder portion is over! There may also be a gap between the shareholder meeting and battery day event (different buildings). And if any of this is on Elon time, well, then I'll be fine.

 

[mongo]

Link please to the Shanghai shutdown. I'm not seeing it reported.

Here:

This video claims Shanghai is shutting down for 10 days. Anyone know anything about that? Retooling? Getting Y ready?

The staging lot for deliveries is almost empty.

 

[Chocochip]

I, for one, love the red I’m seeing with TSLA today. Hopefully I see some red (or just very small green numbers) tomorrow as well, as long as those values stay around 1-2%. Not because I’m trading on it — I’m not. But the possibility of a big wave of buying in anticipation of tomorrow’s announcements concerned me as a potential precursor of a massive sell-off event right after. Mind you, this has nothing to do with the actual progress to be announced tomorrow, and everything to do with short-term trading strategies and mind games. But staying low before tomorrow’s updates gets us in a much better place to benefit from whatever the announcement includes.

As I might have mentioned before, the stuff that gets announced tomorrow will take a while to be digested by the “market”, however one chooses to define that. Those who have at least a basic understanding of Li-ion battery tech will figure out the significance of those updates right away, but the wider investment community includes people who think Nikola is a challenger in the EV space, and that GM is better positioned to manufacture batteries and electric drive trains on a large scale because they’re “experienced” and... erm... Ultium! So, yeah, it will take a while…

 

[Krugerrand]

That was a Mid Morning Spike!

I believe it is a fair chance deliveries will beat 82,000 cars just like they did last Q3.

Magic number is 83,000.