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

[BornToFly]

The market sure loves that Rivian sold a few thousand cars at a huge loss in Q3, with a larger percentage of produced but not delivered than Tesla had....

 

[thesmokingman]

Cathy's on CNBC, good news is she added a grip of TSLA shares instead of the usual.

 

[EVDRVN]

Why is it that whenever the stock is dropping hard someone has to do or say something to make it worse rather than the opposite? Strange how that works.

 

[Mengy]

The market sure loves that Rivian sold a few thousand cars at a huge loss in Q3, with a larger percentage of produced but not delivered than Tesla had....

When in doubt, zoom out. TSLA is down 1.89% for the year while RIVN is down 74% for the year.

 

[2daMoon]

When in doubt, zoom out. TSLA is down 1.89% for the year while RIVN is down 74% for the year.

You meant YOY, right? (trailing 12 months) and RIVN hasn't been traded for 12 months yet.

For the year (based on close at end of 2021) TSLA is down 31%, and RIVN is down 66%

 

[Skryll]

We're already off the rails so I'll say my bit.
Elon's brain is great at many things, but my impression is that he's greater *inside the realms of physics*. The more he works in a "factual" universe, where things are clearer and more deterministic, the better he fares.
This is where his First Principles mindset thrives. I'm sure his neuroatypical brain is really happy in those domains, he's like Kal-El from Kripton.

He's really good also in more blurred realms a bit outside that. Economy, communication/marketing, design (link in "make things pretty", engineering is his forte). Socially he's a bit awkward but he can be highly effective as well.

But I would stay away from real, dirty politics. When you have 107M followers on Twitter, is just dangerous to state "facts" about history of a country you probably visited once or twice. History of Soviet Union is literally one of the most complex theme of the planet. You can call every major expert in the world and their statements would be wary and devoid of absolutes. They will know they know a little part of the whole. There are no *literal facts*. It's just too complex: it's billion people fighting each other for a century. There is no easy solution, no silver bullet, no clear definition of boundaries. War is messy, it f**ks with your brains, destroys all rationality. What we see now is the consequence of decades of war, cold and hot.

And weighting with a few tweets, well, it's a recipe for a s**tstorm. I know his heart is in the right place on this one but he's not "speaking truth to power", but damaging an already damaged discourse, IMHO.

I would nominate this for the offtopic post of utmost merit. Wish I could cut and paste this into Twitter discourse

 

[Skryll]

Fun thought. Tesla's margins are so high that they could sell cars to legacy auto at a discount, and then Tesla and legacy auto would still have higher margins than legacy auto has today. (not even talking about EV margins which are close to or below zero for most)

This is essentially what happens with the used teslas I see for sale on our local ford stealership. They get them from auctions and sell at a healthy profit

 

[rallykeeper]

Used prices on Teslas from their website are crazy low right now.

Not to be a totally blind Tesla bull, but you can basically get a 2019 model 3 for $25k + $15k FSD right now, since FSD is included, excluding transportation costs of about $2k (for my area, where it's literally illegal to sell Teslas...one day, humans will grow brains).

Expecting all the OCD people to tear apart my wording there, but that's how it is. Tell all of your friends. Teslas for the people!

What's super funny is a lot of these 2019 Teslas are coming off lease and Tesla basically gets to sell the car some >1 multiple number of times because of this, with the way used car prices are. Heh. Heh heh. Surely this won't impact earnings!

I'd add that prices seem to have come down slightly since month-end. I wasn't tracking any particular models, but a week ago when I was shopping, ~40k mile 2019 3s were going for about $42k in SoCal.

This week, they seem to be approaching $40k. You can even get a high 40's mileage 2020 3 for about $43.5k. May just be a function of inventory mix and the exact mileage discount applied, but interesting.

Overall though, Tesla is likely managing a nice double-dip here by adding FSD. Presumably, they had "purchased" these vehicles off lease for less than $25k.

 

[Drumheller]

When in doubt, zoom out. TSLA is down 1.89% for the year while RIVN is down 74% for the year.

TSLA is down 38.3% since November of 2021, 11 months ago.

The half price sale doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon.

 

[Mengy]

You meant YOY, right? (trailing 12 months) and RIVN hasn't been traded for 12 months yet.

For the year (based on close at end of 2021) TSLA is down 31%, and RIVN is down 66%

Yeah, I forgot RIVN stock is less than one year on the market. Feels longer than that!

 

[Nolimits]

5 shares a baller here

Nothing wrong w DCA.

 

[MartinAustin]

I have not seen an Elon tweet that I didn’t like. Not yet.

The "we will coup whoever we want, ha ha" tweet was inadvisable

 

[Chenkers]

Just watch what the consensus is and the fed does exactly that. They have yet to deviate away from what the market predicted.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was widely expected to increase rates by 0.5% today but instead came out with a 0.25% increase. Economic conditions and reasoning behind the increase is similar to the USA market but the RBA appears ready to slow the rate of increases to give tme for the market to absorb the impact of previous hikes. I believe the RBA are the first to do this in this cycle and it could signal a similar direction for the Fed in future meetings. Any softening of stance in this market will be well received.

More details here: Major banks raise mortgage rates as RBA slows pace of its increases

 

[rallykeeper]

Just curious if anyone thought today's drop could be Credit Suisse selling some or all of their 4.8 million TSLA shares

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/tsla/institutional-holdings

I'm just trying to justify this drop with record breaking P/D numbers released. If 'analyst' couldn't correctly identify that there would be logistical challenges with worldwide deliveries shouldn't that reflect an error in their research and not a problem with Tesla's growth potential? Maybe I'm still in shock/denial phase

Don't think so.

Those institutional holdings are not Credit Suisse directly, but held by mutual funds and other investment product managed by CS throughout the world.

CS' internal capital pressures shouldn't directly impact any selling by its funds. Over time, you may see CS funds sell if they see outflows because of all the bad headlines, but that will take a long time to play out.

If you really want to geek out, you can look at the 13F filing for CS and see all the various sub-entities that roll up to these 4.8 million shares.

EDGAR Filing Documents for 0001567619-22-015785

p.s., as an added geek-out, this is surprisingly good and transparent 13F disclosure by CS.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

I thought TSLA was underperforming the market? In any case we could be red at the close.

There is always that one in the crowd......

 

[Gigapress]

Still hard to fathom how we're down at $250 ($750 pre split) after record P&D numbers and an almost certain record ATH ER coming in two weeks. Makes me wonder if Q4 expectations are too high to realistically pass Wall Street's presumptions? Is Q4 doomed to be a negative hit no matter how impressive it ends up being?

Institutional analysts would have to nearly double their Q4 estimates for the eventual results to be framed negatively, I think. They can get away with this in Q3 somewhat because the delivery numbers aren't much higher than Q1 or last year's Q4. Then, their estimates become totally egregious as we look out to 2023 and especially 2024 ($7 ).

MarketWatch says the average Q4 non-GAAP earnings estimate is $1.30/share, and nobody has gone above $2.00.

For comparison, for *Q3* most Tesla retail analysts have been estimating earnings in the $1.2X range, and back when we expected deliveries to be closer to production we generally had estimates circa $1.30-$1.50.

For Q4, right now I have $2.20/share, 69% higher than the Wall Street average. My estimate is based on $58k ASP, 492k vehicles sold, 32.8% auto gross margin before credits, and an extra $1B miscellaneous profit coming Energy/ZEV credits/Service & Other. Even if I delete the Energy and Services profit, reduce auto GM to 30%, and reduce deliveries to 480k, the output is still $1.68/share, which is 29% higher than the Street.

It's not just me either. I am skeptical of my own opinion on Q4 estimates because I've been calling Q4 2022 as the big earnings breakout for the last 12 months and I have a strong financial interest in a bunch of call options expiring in Q1. I am trying damn hard to work around these biases but you never really know with these kinds of things until the real numbers come in and by then it's too late to change course.

• James Stephenson: $2.11
  • As of this Aug 22nd video, not sure if he has since updated
• @StarFoxisDown!: $2 (GAAP)
  • Posted this yesterday
  • Probably would be around $2.11 non-GAAP
  • "fairly conservative"
• Tesla Economist: $2.39
  • As of this Sep 9th video, not sure if he has since updated
• @The Accountant: $1.66 (GAAP)
  • Posted Sep 10th
  • Probably $1.77 non-GAAP
  • Estimation methodology deliberately biased toward underestimating true value in order to be conservative
• @petit_bateau: $1.46 (GAAP)
  • Posted Sep 11th
  • Probably $1.57 non-GAAP

Wall Street is projecting $7.14 on average for 2024, with the highest estimate at $13.72. This is not $7.14 for Q4 '24; it's for the whole year. That's $1.79 per quarter. Virtually all Tesla retail analysts who actually have done their homework and who aren't beholden to the desires of their investment banking employers are predicting on average $2/share non-GAAP for Q4 '22. This is why I expect Q4 earnings will be punch in the face for the financial industry such that analysts will be forced to substantially revise their models not only for Q1 but for years into the future, because I see no way for them to justify projections of earnings shrinking as Tesla sells more cars.

As usual, this is not investment or financial advice. Do your own research. Copy my moves or analysis at your own risk.

 

[MartinAustin]

What's going on

 

[elasalle]

So we had a share dump because we exceeded max pain of $255 ....

 

[zach_]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1577329137936654337

 

[ntam]

TSLA just went from $256 to $250 in a couple of ticks. What happened?