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

[Tes La Ferrari]

Very short-term I wouldn't buy here, there are better short-term plays. That doesn't mean TSLA won't perform well in the short-term, it's a risk/reward thing.

I remain committed to TSLA as a HODLer, but I place some small % fun bets or consider other interesting stocks from time to time.

Care to share your better short-term plays ?

 

[insaneoctane]

It's normal and appropriate for the NTHSA to do an investigation if a report is made. If they didn't do that I would be concerned about the organizations existence. They are doing they job.

What is not normal is the way the media reacts.

Hmm. I would suggest it is normal for the media react this way. No one here is surprised in the least....it's sad, unethical, and wrong, but, unfortunately, normal.

 

[StealthP3D]

I remain committed to TSLA as a HODLer, but I place some small % fun bets or consider other interesting stocks from time to time.

Care to share your better short-term plays ?

Sorry, I don't trade short-term. It's not worth my time when the same money can be compounding long-term with great companies. It's two completely different things. When investing short-term you are working the odds. You win some and you lose some. I have a proven ability to make it pay but I only have one life to live and it takes a lot of time. Not only does it take a lot out of you but it's also about as fundamentally unproductive as it gets. I mentioned the short-term thing simply to point out that not all excellent investments go up immediately (and they don't have to for them to be excellent investments).

In other words, TSLA is valued highly enough that it's not a given the market will recognize additional value until the market becomes more educated about the many advantages Tesla has going forward. And that can take a long time and be difficult to predict when it will happen. People have a very poor understanding about who Tesla is and what makes them tick. It's pretty obvious the attacks are piling up right now and I do expect some sustained efforts to harm Tesla as their two factories ramp. I doubt it will be all that effective at harming Tesla (the company) but it could change public perception enough to keep the pressure on the stock for some time. Or the market could wake up tomorrow. It's one of those things where you won't know how it will play out until it's already happening. I don't need to worry about it as a long holder. I still have a plan to buy more if it goes down enough on more silliness because that changes the risk profile for me and allows me to hold more shares without concern.

 

[Carl Raymond]

How bad does a story need to be to get 2 downvotes for every upvote…

Comments universally scathing too.

CNBC has to be aware they are alienating their viewers with this tripe.

 

[StealthP3D]

It's normal and appropriate for the NTHSA to do an investigation if a report is made. If they didn't do that I would be concerned about the organizations existence. They are doing they job.

I totally disagree. Public agencies should only do investigations when there is enough evidence to warrant the opening of a formal investigation. Not every complaint or "report" will automatically meet that threshold. This is a witch hunt.

 

[StealthP3D]

How bad does a story need to be to get 2 downvotes for every upvote…

Comments universally scathing too.

CNBC has to be aware they are alienating their viewers with this tripe.

View attachment 697628

A link would make it easier for us to downvote it!

 

[Tes La Ferrari]

Tesla expands legal, external relations workforce in China

Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) is hiring managers for legal and external relations teams in China, according to a job post on its Wechat account, as the electric-car maker faces public scrutiny in the country over safety and customer service complaints.

www.reuters.com

“U.S.-based Tesla, which is making electric Model 3 sedans and Model Y sport-utility vehicles in Shanghai, is hiring external relation managers in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

The company is hiring lawyers specialised in construction, anti-monopoly and data privacy protection areas, while also looking for public relations managers.”

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

Except when people notice that their neighbour has been driving a Tesla for 3 years, and nothing bad has happened...

Yup this is definitely a thing. Had my model S for 5 years. Everyone in the village knows me as the EV guy. I am very often asked "hows the tesla? still happy with it?"

Finally a few months ago a neighbor bought a Nissan Leaf. He would have got a tesla if it was within his budget I'm sure.

 

[petit_bateau]

OT
is there a set of data points somewhere with electric miles tesla's have driven over the last 5-10 years (yes I know) with avg kwh/mile and avg battery size in fleet?

Here are the battery size and fleet size numbers I have been collecting. As it happens I am working to improve my fleet km-driven information so I'll post that up when I've done it.

(If anyone has a set of annual financials, or ideally quarterly, for 2008-2012 that would be most helpful. You may notice minor changes in some of my numbers if you look carefully - that is because I am working bacwards to try to eliminate any issues with the start-point where occasionally I have assumed some 'seed' numbers.)

 

[TheTalkingMule]

CNBC really stretching out to ramp the fear this morning. There's no way this is an actual journalistic sentiment. This kind of stuff is directly paid for and injected into your day. Strange times.

 

[j6Lpi429@3j]

China *could* align itself with Belgium and exploit its waffles. The question is whether or not that's likely. Its shocking just how awful most 'journalism' is now. Bubblegum clickbait for the masses, to sell ad space to big-auto companies. Not news.

 

[NicoV]

Germany proposed max 44eurocents/kWh for their subsidized fast charger network:

German government issues tenders for €2B fast-charger network buildout; 1,000 locations

In order to provide a basic fast-charging infrastructure for medium- and long-haul traffic, the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) is putting out tenders for the construction and operation of 1,000 fast charging locations, each with several charging points...

www.greencarcongress.com

Hopefully Tesla wins a lot of those.

 

[lascavarian]

Pre-market suggests open may be a little rocky.

NHTSA probe likely to target fixation artifact it seems to me. All the flashing lights draws the drivers attention and where you look tends to be where you steer.

2021.24.3 is coming out with some goodies

 

[elasalle]

Just a thought
There was a time when it seemed Chanos was the master of media manipulation ..

Now FUD and Burry short positions seem to we working in tandem… which is chicken and which is the egg …..???

 

[Todd Burch]

Lots of the market in general is down a bit in premarket. Not a Tesla-specific thing.

I think macro events (Afghanistan) are spooking the markets a bit, and people are making too big a deal about this NHTSA investigation. I mean, how many NHTSA ivestigations have there been that have basically turned up nothing? How many more will there be?

 

[jamaatta]

Some Tesla-activity going on in India.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1427498550485610499

 

[elasalle]

Some Tesla-activity going on in India.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1427498550485610499

The most un camouflaged car in India must be the camouflaged Tesla 3 and Y(reported seen yesterday )
Not a Tesla would have been a better choice

 

[engle]

This NHTSA investigation is just short-term noise in the long-term $TSLA investor scheme of things. IMHO, it created a buying opportunity due to typical over-reaction. The timing is perfect for Elon since he gets to respond when he and Andrei K describe FSD 4.0 and, hopefully, we get to meet Tesla Robot 1.0! The NHTSA won't be able to investigate Tesla Robots that walk into a concrete wall because the all-vision NN cannot recognize it since it is out of their jurisdiction. As long as Tesla Robots do not get lost and wander off onto US highways we are good! I just cannot wait to pre-order my first Tesla Robot - I might even spring for the "Signature" model! (Issac Asimov was my favorite SciFi author growing up. Heard him speak at my late father's MS Business graduation but forgot what he said.)

My "first" (only ) wife enjoys swing trading a small part of our shares in a Roth margin acct. She had 300 "out" (8/3 @ ~$715). After the 4% drop on Monday, she bought back 100 @ $687.17. She's buying back another 100 in pre-market after it opens to her at 4 am PDT (now ~$675). The remaining 100 she'll watch and wait. I asked her to be all-in shares before AI Day in case it pops afterwards: (yesterday, I showed my 20-something son how to do a small buy-in during the evening session with Fidelity Active Trader Pro)

Tesla AI Day August 19th: Updated and New Predictions based upon Tesla's hint published by Rob Maurer

Tesla Begins Sending Out AI Day Invitations

My 1st prediction that the FSD 4.0 chip architecture and board will be announced was correct.

Prediction #2: it's being installed in all new S/3/X on 8/19 to avoid the Osbourne effect.

Tesla is working on robotics with the "Leonardo da Vinci of Robots" [1]. It should be obvious what the "secret project" is when you check out UCLA Samueli School of Engineering [*] Professor Dennis Hong's lab webpage:

RoMeLa | The Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA

The lab studies: "humanoid robots and novel mobile robot locomotion strategies", including autonomous robots.

Prediction #3: One of the lab's robots is running Tesla's code running on FSD 4.0 to navigate the real world!! It is funny that one of the lab's robots is called "Darwin" after the scientist of course - not the award winners.

Prediction #4: Attendees on 8/19 will witness at least one of Prof. Hong's UCLA teams' RoMeLa robots navigate the real world running Tesla code on FSD 4.0.

If my predictions are accurate, this will be huge!! For example, Tesla Robots will be able to do chores around the house to help seniors live independently with dignity in their homes longer without having to hire outside help. Just like our Tesla vehicles, firmware downloads will enable new features over time. A brand new Tesla product category!!

This is why Elon said during the 2021 Q2 conference call:

"long term, people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company, or an energy company. I think we are developing one of the strongest hardware and software AI teams in the world... So a long story but I think, yeah, probably others will want to use it too and we will make it available."

For insight into what Tesla is doing with the DOJO server technology, one only has to look at what Elon tweeted on 2020-09-20:

View attachment 691907

See what Google did with their generations of TPUs (Tensor Processing Units):

View attachment 691904
Google has announced their TPUv4 but it isn't generally available to Google Cloud customers yet:

Google claims its new TPUs are 2.7 times faster than the previous generation
"This year’s MLPerf results suggest Google’s fourth-generation TPUs are nothing to scoff at. On an image classification task that involved training an algorithm (ResNet-50 v1.5) to at least 75.90% accuracy with the ImageNet data set, 256 fourth-gen TPUs finished in 1.82 minutes. That’s nearly as fast as 768 Nvidia A100 graphics cards combined with 192 AMD Epyc 7742 CPU cores (1.06 minutes) and 512 of Huawei’s AI-optimized Ascend910 chips paired with 128 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 cores (1.56 minutes). Third-gen TPUs had the fourth-gen beat at 0.48 minutes of training, but perhaps only because 4,096 third-gen TPUs were used in tandem." [VentureBeat]

Prediction #5: Tesla did in fact develop the current fastest DNN (Deep Neural Network model) training supercomputer in the world as Elon predicted a year ago. A product called something like "Tesla AI Cloud" will be announced on August 19th or some time thereafter.

If true, this is also huge for investors!! For example, $AMZN makes most of its profits from AWS [1].

I believe $TSLA will be the first company to solve real-world real-time visual machine navigation (auto, robot, whatever) using their DOJO supercomputers to train their DNN (Deep Neural Network models). The photo shows 25 chiplets per assembly. Those will have the fastest interconnection bandwidth. I expect these supercomputers contain 1,024+ of these assemblies interconnected by some kind of super-fast bus topology. This is DNN training silicon and is distinct from FSD 4.0 which is used for inference only to infer what the video feeds are "seeing" in the real world.

Tesla Dojo supercomputers can be used for general-purpose machine learning (ML) training. ML training basically involves billions+ of matrix multiplications [2] of vectors and matrices with forward and backward propagation to calculate what are called "parameters" (probabilities) inside a multiple-layer model. The word "deep" in deep learning comes from the fact that often these models have over a hundred or more layers.

Sophisticated Wall $treet investors have already figured this stuff out. That is what started moving $TSLA higher and broke us back up through $700.

[1] Dr. Dennis Hong on Achieving the Impossible With Robotic Inventions
[2] How Amazon Makes Money
[3] A Complete Beginners Guide to Matrix Multiplication for Data Science with Python Numpy

[*] My son is an MSCS student at UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering but I don't think he's taken any classes with Prof. Dennis Hong:

View attachment 691908

 

[TheTalkingMule]

I'm thinking another 2% drop this morning then the buying recommences. Big boys will find <$670 irresistible.

I think we close green today and are back at $720 by next Friday. MM's will be perfectly happy with that and we'll for some reason be overjoyed.

 

[ZeApelido]

No one said legacy auto was trying to do badly.

Sandbagging follows incompetence. If they were competent, they wouldn't need to sandbag. If a company is incompetent at making EV's it basically means they can't do it profitably. And if you know you can't do it profitably you don't make a few million of them, you pretend like you know what you're doing and make sure you only make a few thousand at a time (while telling us many more are on the way, again and again). I don't think the end (their survival) justifies the means (their deception).

I call it sandbagging because they continue to act like they are about to release a whole slew of EV's, but they never do. And they knew they weren't going to. It's unethical deception. We have a capitalistic system in which the ones most capable of meeting the market needs are supposed to thrive and the incompetent ones die off. We need to rapidly pivot away from carbon to preserve the habitat that sustains us and makes our lives possible. They are subverting the system by lying and delaying. It would be better if they just died off and let those capable of meeting critical market needs take over. That's what will happen anyway but the lying and deception is subverting our system, making it less efficient at meeting market needs and threatening our species (all species). Delay of game is illegal in competitive sports, it should be a more serious offense when our lives depend upon not delaying.

The ICE industry is desperately trying to slow down EV's while simultaneously acting like they are pivoting to EV's tomorrow. In just one more year they will have a gazillion new EV models. For proof they are purposefully delaying, and to see how messed up they are, watch this Autoline Afterhours episode from two weeks ago. These dinosaurs actually had the nerve to call it "Stretching More Life Out of the ICE"!

They have a Bosch manager on there who has some interesting comments as he tries to convince people the transition to EV's will be a slow process (out of necessity). They know exactly what they are doing in terms of gaming the system, spreading misinformation and lobbying to keep ICE alive as long as possible. It's disgusting.

Why is it so unacceptable to some people to simply let the least efficient die off and the best lead the way? That's what makes capitalism good. Take that away and capitalism no longer works for humanity, it works against us. Don't make excuses for them. The fact that they are incompetent doesn't make them bad people but, if they can't cook they should get out of the kitchen. Instead, they keep telling us dinner will be served in one more hour. But it's already 3 hours past midnight! Meanwhile, there is an awesome chef in a small kitchen down the hall churning out delicious meals but word is the food has worms in it, causes indigestion, tastes terrible and it might even kill you. We need to get the FDA investigating their kitchen before more people die! If only the bad chefs in the big established kitchens had some government assistance they could make some really delicious food and feed everyone. It won't be cheap but it will look very nice and the consistency will be world class. It will happen within the (next) hour. Always one more hour.

People who can't see how our futures are being pulled out from under us in the name of narrow financial interests fail the easiest intelligence quiz ever made! It should be obvious to all but the most gullible.

This comment wins: