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

[ZachF]

Most stocks down a percent or less right now.

 

[bkp_duke]

Tesla closes China showroom, be ready for demand FUD even though it seems like a smart move to close an underutilized asset.

Tesla closes its first showroom in China in retail strategy shift - sources

Electric vehicle giant Tesla has closed what had been its flagship showroom in China, a move sources described as one aimed at paring retail costs in its second-largest market.

www.reuters.com

If I were a betting man, I would bet that the owner of the building thought that they could jack up Tesla's lease rate. Tesla probably did some analysis and determined it wasn't worth it.

Sadly, I'm sure Rotoreuters won't cover when Tesla opens a new sales location within 5 blocks . . .

 

[2daMoon]

OK, now compare the effect of the 2020 split with the effect of the 2022 split.
That's hardcore data right there. Now, prove that it was not Elon's Twitter obsession and share dumping that made the huge difference.

The goal of analysis and the scientific method is to offer proof of what IS, rather than proof of what IS NOT.

If the numbers support it, then those can be shared for all to see taking into account the related variables, as offered by @Gigapress posts.

If someone has data that demonstrates an alternate perspective which proves otherwise it would be interesting to see.

 

[M|S|M MYP]

What time today is the FED scheduled to 'tank' the market again? Asking for a friend.

J/k...cheer up y'all, we could see a good day later

 

[JRP3]

Depending on what evidence you have, the "I think" preface suggested by @2daMoon might be appropriate.

I don't think we live in a universe where a CEO repeatedly selling significant numbers of shares to buy an unrelated company and the unknown surrounding potential further sales doesn't depress the stock price. It could be that I'm in the wrong universe.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Is 0-60 in 20 seconds true? Disappointing.

Did you forget the smiley face? Versus, what, [edit] minutes for an ICE fully loaded? And maintaining highway speeds up a 5% grade is also something no ICE engine can do as anyone who travels through mountain freeways can attest to.

 

[TheGrimSweeper]

While many people are complaining about Elon (Twitter, selling TSLA, political, etc.), I keep seeing more things he does that I'm grateful for....

Like after watching the Lex/Karpathy marathon interview. Andrew was giving Elon credit for something that many take for granted around here - his ability to run an extremely efficient organization (aka "tight ship"). But somehow he does this at scale. If you've ever worked at a large company, you know how much bloat and soul robbing processes/red tape exists. Elon has found a recipe to massively scale the "skunk works" spirit. I don't know of any ~Trillion dollar companies that have scaled as well as Tesla has. They still trim fat on occasion, but that's exactly the point. If it can be bottled, this recipe is priceless IMO.

I find almost everyone spewing hate for Elon has never actually met or talked to him in real life.

Most cases I find of people who know him or have met him (even guys like Dave Chappelle who wouldn't hold back) have said he's a pretty easy guy to talk too and only say good things.

 

[2daMoon]

I don't think we live in a universe where a CEO repeatedly selling significant numbers of shares to buy an unrelated company and the unknown surrounding potential further sales doesn't depress the stock price. It could be that I'm in the wrong universe.

I wholeheartedly agree...

with the edited/bolded/underlined part. ​

Analysis based only upon one's feelings is challenging to measure.

 

[ZachF]

I find almost everyone spewing hate for Elon has never actually met or talked to him in real life.

Most cases I find of people who know him or have met him (even guys like Dave Chappelle who wouldn't hold back) have said he's a pretty easy guy to talk too and only say good things.

That’s because the hate is mostly virtue signaling

 

[Paracelsus]

What time today is the FED scheduled to 'tank' the market again? Asking for a friend.

J/k...cheer up y'all, we could see a good day later

The ever-pessimistic side of me regarding DC and Wall Street’s ever-cozy relationship says we could see an optimistic report from the fed’s today………and that this news will result in at least a short rally. Mid-term’s are just around the corner, and WS has traditionally rewarded any administration from either side of the aisle that has treated them well with a rally. And this administration has arguably done just as much as any other. Of course I welcome the rally as we all see TSLA as being oversold. But I still wish the world was so much more transparent. Imagine how much more productive the conversation could be here on TMC alone if speculation wasn’t necessary in almost every observation and comment

 

[CHGolferJim]

Did you forget the smiley face? Versus, what, 40 seconds for an ICE fully loaded? And maintaining highway speeds up a 5% grade is also something no ICE engine can do as anyone who travels through mountain freeways can attest to.

Admit I don’t know the ICE comparative. 20 struck me as kinda slow, but if twice as fast as ICE that should be fine, the comparative economics will drive the rapid changeover.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Admit I don’t know the ICE comparative. 20 struck me as kinda slow, but if twice as fast as ICE that should be fine, the comparative economics will drive the rapid changeover.

Turns out I was waaaay off. From a 2006 forum post:

In my US Xpress Freightliner with a Detroit 60 series Automatic, hauling Full gross 80,000 lbs i can do 0-60 in about 2-3 miles if i remember correctly so about 5 minutes, with less weight like right now i have 25,000 lbs in the box i can proably do 0-60 in 1 mile or 2 minutes

 

[hobbes]

Fully loaded, though. Not disappointing IMO.

Are we going to see fully loaded semis on the drag strip ?

 

[scaesare]

Did you forget the smiley face? Versus, what, 40 seconds for an ICE fully loaded? And maintaining highway speeds up a 5% grade is also something no ICE engine can do as anyone who travels through mountain freeways can attest to.

Exactly. Looking at something in the 1100+ HP neighborhood:

 

[Gigapress]

OK, now compare the effect of the 2020 split with the effect of the 2022 split.
That's hardcore data right there. Now, prove that it was not Elon's Twitter obsession and share dumping that made the huge difference.

As far as I know we don't even have conclusive evidence that stock split was the primary cause of the share price change in 2020 in the weeks after. (Post hoc ergo propter hoc - Wikipedia). Prior to the 2022 split coming into effect, I read some of the economics literature on share splits and didn't find any conclusive evidence that share splits have any effect in general.

Then, even if the split was really important, do you have a suggestion for how to test the magnitude of the effect of Twitter and share dumping on the 2022 split without a bunch of confounding variables muddying the comparison, and without being tripped up by our sample size of 2?

Such as:

• Macroeconomic differences

• The splits having happened in two different years, one of which (2020) is known to be associated with all kinds of anomalies throughout all kinds of different time series, such that any simple face-value comparison of events from 2020 and other years is likely spurious

• Tesla's business and finances being radically different now than in 2020

• TSLA having very different momentum going into the 2020 and 2022 splits

• 2020 was the year retail investment trading drove an unprecedented explosion of TSLA option market activity

Macros are easy to make a rough adjustment for, and that's obviously the first thing to look at, considering that 84% of the short-term variation in TSLA can be predicted simply by knowing what happened with the S&P 500.

Purple arrows indicate when splits happened.

 

[ZachF]

Exactly. Looking at something in the 1100+ HP neighborhood:

View attachment 870208

Remember, electric horsepower is worth much more than ICE horsepower when it comes to acceleration.

-much less drivetrain losses (no transmission) Multi motor EVs don’t even need differential gears.
-much better traction control
-average power delivery is much closer to peak rating than on ICE. When it shifts into a higher gear, the engine will travel up an RPM range and produce less than peak power everywhere but the peak at a specific RPM.
-when shifting gears, power delivery to wheels is zero. During acceleration an ICE will be shifting gears ~10% of the time.

 

[SmokyPeat]

As far as I know we don't even have conclusive evidence that stock split was the primary cause of the share price change in 2020 in the weeks after. (Post hoc ergo propter hoc - Wikipedia). Prior to the 2022 split coming into effect, I read some of the economics literature on share splits and didn't find any conclusive evidence that share splits have any effect in general.

Then, even if the split was really important, do you have a suggestion for how to test the magnitude of the effect of Twitter and share dumping on the 2022 split without a bunch of confounding variables muddying the comparison, and without being tripped up by our sample size of 2?

Such as:

• Macroeconomic differences

• The splits happened in two different years, one of which (2020) has been observed to be correlated with strange outcomes in a wide variety of economic societal areas beyond just the stock market, such that any simple face-value comparison of events from 2020 and other years is likely spurious

• Tesla's business and finances being radically different now than in 2020

• TSLA having very different momentum going into the 2020 and 2022 splits

• 2020 was the year retail investment trading drove an unprecedented explosion of TSLA option market activity

Macros are easy to make a rough adjustment for, and that's obviously the first thing to look at, considering that 84% of the short-term variation in TSLA can be predicted simply by knowing what happened with the S&P 500.

Purple arrows indicate when splits happened.

View attachment 870213


View attachment 870209

View attachment 870211

I'm not sure there's much point to beating this dead horse. Let's just agree that the TSLA stock performance has been pretty abysmal this year along with most of the NASDAQ. Still two months left to turn the ship around. Let's hope the helmsman isn't drunk.

 

[wipster]

Love this article by Zach Shanan this morning! He really shows how decieving headlines are these days:

Does The Chevy Bolt Have "Huge Sales" Now? - CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! CNN Business recently published an article titled “The Chevy Bolt’s huge sales prove America is craving a cheap electric car.” It caught my attention since I track auto sales, and especially electric vehicle...

cleantechnica.com

 

[InTheMiddle]

Here's something else that's been debunked that could have stopped that conversation before it even started:

The notion that selling from Elon has any material effect on the short-term TSLA price after factoring out the correlation with macros.​

​

• We can have 95% confidence that there is a small, transitory, non-zero downward effect that lasts for maybe one day when Elon sells.

• When he sells more than 5% of total trading volume, we have a sample of 5 data points with roughly 7% decline. However the effect appears transitory because in all cases, TSLA reached the same original price level again at some point within the subsequent week or two.

This result may be counterintuitive to a lot of people who want to keep worrying and posting about it. The evidence indicates that this activity is a complete waste of time, except maybe on the options thread where people have real concerns about stock price movements occurring in a matter of a day or two.

This chart shows, for each of the 20 days Elon has sold, the TSLA price change from opening to closing after adjusting for TSLA's beta.

View attachment 870155
TSLA price % change from open to close on days Elon has sold:
n = 20
Sample Average = -2.3%
Std Dev = 4.8%
95% confidence interval = [-4.4%, -0.2%]
99% confidence interval = [-5.06%, 0.46%]

TSLA price % change from the opening price on the day of the sale to the day 5 trading days after the sale:
n = 20
Sample Average = +0.9%
Std Dev = 9.2%
95% confidence interval = [-3.1%, 4.9%]
99% confidence interval = [-4.4%, 6.2%]


So, historically Elon's sales are associated with an expected average single-day TSLA decline of about 2.3% give or take 2 or 3 percentage points. We don't even have high confidence that the true average effect is less than zero, because 0 is on the edge of the margin of error. TSLA actually gained on 5 of the 20 days in which Elon has sold.

As a matter of fact, when looking at all of Elon's sales, the potential downward bias appears to be transitory. The data shows no evidence of consistent residual impact on the TSLA price a week after the sale, and on average TSLA has gone 0.9% higher after 5 trading days have elapsed.

Spoiler: Raw Data in table

Date	Elon Sale Amount	Total TSLA Volume	Elon % of TSLA Volume	TSLA Open	TSLA Close	TSLA % Change	TSLA Close 5 trading days later	TSLA % Change 5 trading days later	S&P 500 Open	S&P 500 Close	S&P 500 % Change	TSLA Expected % Change Based on Linear Model of S&P 500 Influence	TSLA Deviation from Expected performance
8/9/2022	3,040,228	28,748,230	10.6%	870.88	850	-2.4%	919.69	5.60%	4133.11	4122.47	-0.3%	0.2%	-2.6%
8/8/2022	1,583,879	33,121,762	4.8%	885	871.27	-1.6%	927.96	4.85%	4155.93	4140.06	-0.4%	0.2%	-1.8%
8/5/2022	3,300,000	37,724,301	8.7%	908.01	864.51	-4.8%	900.09	-0.87%	4115.87	4145.19	0.7%	0.2%	-5.0%
4/28/2022	5,230,000	41,649,512	12.6%	899.98	877.51	-2.5%	873.28	-2.97%	4222.58	4287.5	1.5%	3.3%	-5.8%
4/27/2022	345,601	25,652,131	1.3%	898.58	881.51	-1.9%	952.62	6.01%	4186.52	4183.96	-0.1%	0.2%	-2.1%
4/26/2022	4,069,399	45,377,887	9.0%	995.43	876.42	-12.0%	909.25	-8.66%	4278.14	4175.2	-2.4%	-4.7%	-7.2%
12/28/2021	934,090	20,107,971	4.6%	1109.49	1088.47	-1.9%	1149.59	3.61%	4795.49	4786.35	-0.2%	0.2%	-2.1%
12/22/2021	340,564	31,211,359	1.1%	965.66	1008.87	4.5%	1070.34	10.84%	4650.36	4696.56	1.0%	0.2%	4.3%
12/21/2021	934,091	23,839,311	3.9%	916.87	938.53	2.4%	1086.19	18.47%	4594.96	4649.23	1.2%	0.2%	2.2%
12/16/2021	934,091	27,590,480	3.4%	994.5	926.92	-6.8%	1067	7.29%	4719.13	4668.67	-1.1%	0.2%	-7.0%
12/13/2021	934,091	26,198,500	3.6%	1001.09	966.41	-3.5%	899.94	-10.10%	4710.3	4668.97	-0.9%	0.2%	-3.7%
12/9/2021	934,091	19,812,830	4.7%	1060.64	1003.8	-5.4%	926.92	-12.61%	4691	4667.45	-0.5%	0.2%	-5.6%
12/2/2021	934,091	24,371,619	3.8%	1099.06	1084.6	-1.3%	1003.8	-8.67%	4504.73	4577.1	1.6%	3.5%	-4.8%
11/23/2021	934,091	36,171,699	2.6%	1167.51	1109.03	-5.0%	1095	-6.21%	4678.48	4690.7	0.3%	0.2%	-5.2%
11/16/2021	934,091	26,542,359	3.5%	1003.31	1054.73	5.1%	1109.03	10.54%	4679.42	4700.9	0.5%	0.2%	4.9%
11/15/2021	934,091	34,775,648	2.7%	1017.63	1013.39	-0.4%	1156.87	13.68%	4689.3	4682.8	-0.1%	0.2%	-0.6%
11/12/2021	1,200,000	25,573,150	4.7%	1047.5	1033.42	-1.3%	1137.06	8.55%	4655.24	4682.85	0.6%	0.2%	-1.5%
11/11/2021	639,737	22,396,570	2.9%	1102.77	1063.51	-3.6%	1096.38	-0.58%	4659.39	4649.27	-0.2%	0.2%	-3.8%
11/10/2021	500,000	42,802,719	1.2%	1010.41	1067.95	5.7%	1089.01	7.78%	4670.26	4646.71	-0.5%	0.2%	5.5%
11/9/2021	3,088,047	59,105,840	5.2%	1173.6	1023.5	-12.8%	1054.73	-10.13%	4707.25	4685.25	-0.5%	0.2%	-13.0%
11/8/2021	934,091	33,445,719	2.8%	1149.785	1162.94	1.1%	1013.39	-11.86%	4701.48	4701.7	0.0%	0.2%	0.9%

Thanks for the detailed analysis here! However...I generally agree with the old addage that there are three types of lies: white lies, damned lies, and statistics, and this is definitely looking like a simplified version of the homework that I was just recently helping my still-in-high-school-but-taking-stats-in-college-at-the-same-time-just-for-fun daughter do last week, so let's have some fun here.

First off, change from open-to-close each day, rather than prior-day-close-to-this-day-close is a *very* interesting choice. So, just to be clear, for yesterday, your approach would say TSLA went from an OPEN of $234.05 to a CLOSE of $227.82, for a LOSS of $6.23 per share, rather than the $0.28 GAIN that I show for yesterday ($227.54 COM 10/31 to $227.82 COM 11/1). Odd - I seem to remember my remaining shares making money yesterday, not a several-percentage-point loss.

Perhaps this should be a quick poll...Please click LIKE if your TSLA shares went up $0.28/share yesterday and click DISLIKE if your TSLA shares went down $6.23/share yesterday.

 

[Singuy]

Looking like people are placing bearish bet for this afternoon vs bullish bet the last few meetings. This is a great sign.