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

[Tommy O]

Well for sure Optimus probably won't be doing a lot of these moves around the factory:

Parkour moves and walking in the snow are required to assemble Teslas. Get with the times, man.

 

[EVWatcher]

Hopefully this snippet from Bloomberg this morning will put our collective minds somewhat at ease:
View attachment 871554

I would have attached the whole article but it's paywalled.

Anyone have the expertise to hazard a guess at what China ending covid zero would do short term to demand for energy and raw materials and how that would impact inflation? My gut tells me it would be bad but I may not be fully thinking it through?

 

[kanweg]

I’m in a bit of a pickle.

So, there are TMC members who say that borrowing money against your stock to buy more TSLA is fine, and other members are totally against it, but that leaves middle of the road by doing it moderately. I’m safe, even after the drops of this year, from being margin-called. My loan is currently 12% of the stock value. So, what could possibly go wrong? Read on.

My (foreign) stock broker has taken over another one in my country and asked me to switch. I can transfer the stock but not the debt. I can take on new debt at the other broker but that will take while (the transfer of the stock will take about a month…!) and I will have to do a test to qualify (I know a bit about Tesla, but not about investing).

I knew this was coming and was looking for a suitable exit point. In hindsight that would have been OK a month ago, but now not so good. And now I received a message that it has to be dealt with before the end of this month.

So now I do have to time the sale to pay off the debt. Any suggestions? i could ask Elon as he is better at timing his sales than I am but doubt that is a realistic option. So, is an uptick likely or am I left with DCA? Any other suggestions/factors to take into account?

 

[StealthP3D]

Folks, take a moment to watch some 10.69.3 videos like the latest from Omar and Kim (I took a few too many notes with timestamps so you can easily see highlights, areas of improvement, reasoning why and how to possibly fix)

TL-DR; It is becoming pretty clear that wide release is imminent.

I'm curious what practical ramifications you see if FSD is released to all purchasers soon? To my way of thinking, it will allow some revenue recognition but that is a one-time thing, with the addition of new FSD purchases being recognized immediately. Yes, that's a lot of revenue but do you have any insight how this is a milestone beyond a book-keeping change?

I suppose it could be taken as general indicator that Tesla thinks it's good enough to increase the user base, but I don't put a lot of weight into it being a strong indicator of progress because I believe they could have gone wide release without too much problem when they decided to use the "Safety Score" (as long as Tesla implemented strong controls to verify users were paying attention and not abusing the system). I think the reason they didn't do that was simply to see how a smaller subset of their customers would get along with it before increasing the user base. Do you think I'm missing something?

In short, I think it could create the appearance of more progress than it actually necessarily indicates. Of course, maybe it will be more improved than I think. Even in that case, I think it's just as possible to hit a technological wall after wide release as before, and end up stalled, without the being able to achieve good progress on "the march of nines" without a fresh approach. I don't like being negative, but my observations make me think the improvements are slowing down, not going exponential as I previously expected. It's already amazing in its capability but it's still a long, long, long, ways from driving unsupervised without getting hung up. I believe I previously under-estimated how difficult it would be to get the last little bit of needed improvement to be fully autonomous.

 

[Bet TSLA]

Lots of engineers talking shop, which is cool and notice that Winston is a Sr. Technical Project Manager. Great to see him talk about creating works of art! At one point, Elon did NOT appreciate Project/Product/Program managers as a critical part of the creation process. He had a notion that all that he needed were *just* good engineers without any assistance from others for non-engineering work like building technical schedules, creating product roadmaps, securing contracts, finding efficiencies throughout the process...etc and thus allowing engineers to flourish and stay focused on their work.

Hearing Andrej on his Lex interview was hard as it seems he was doing too much non-engineering work and that caused him to separate from Tesla. That would have been work that a good Technical Manager could have been doing for Andrej.

I really enjoyed what the engineers had to say about the work and the work environment. But I was also struck by the total lack of women there.

 

[Tommy O]

Anyone have the expertise to hazard a guess at what China ending covid zero would do short term to demand for energy and raw materials and how that would impact inflation? My gut tells me it would be bad but I may not be fully thinking it through?

It would likely be the exact opposite of bad for inflation. Otherwise known as "good."

 

[StealthP3D]

So now I do have to time the sale to pay off the debt. Any suggestions? i could ask Elon as he is better at timing his sales than I am but doubt that is a realistic option. So, is an uptick likely or am I left with DCA? Any other suggestions/factors to take into account?

Trying to guess what a stock's price will do in the short-term is a fool's game. You have a couple of options I can see:

1) Sell and buy back ASAP and hope it doesn't rise. You could even get lucky and buy back for less. Just know that it's a complete gamble and one that I think has odds that are less than 50/50 in your favor. 30 days is quite a long time and you have no guarantee that's all it will be. The amount that the odds are below 50/50 depends upon how long it takes to re-establish your position. I don't say that because TSLA is showing signs of breaking out, it's more of a mathematical thing related to volatility. The reason I don't think the odds are enormously against you is because TSLA has been in a long-term down trend. In this case, that trend is your friend. Countering that is that TSLA is undervalued and growing like gang-busters. Stocks like this tend to go up, on average. Which is why the odds are against you.

2) Get a short-term loan from another source, if possible. This has the risk that you will not be able to pay it off as expected if you can't re-establish margin credit at the new brokerage. I think this might be the only option you have that doesn't necessarily require selling at least a small portion of your non-margined shares (considering your margined shares are underwater).

3) I suppose you could use options to mitigate some of the risk of this transaction but that comes at a high cost and I don't know how you would do that considering you need to transfer your account at the same time. There would still be risk, just not as much (because you could establish your option positions much more quickly, I think, than re-establishing margin credit). I don't like this option because I would rather take my chances that things stay stable or go in my favor than pay the option premiums. The loan, if at all possible, is your best option by far, I think.

I hate to be at the mercy of others which is why I don't recommend margin, at all. Hopefully, someone else thinks of another option I've over-looked.

 

[StealthP3D]

I really enjoyed what the engineers had to say about the work and the work environment. But I was also struck by the total lack of women there.

Why would you be surprised by a lack of women working at Tesla? Everyone knows that, according to a person familiar with the matter, Tesla is a highly sexist place to work.

 

[insaneoctane]

I really enjoyed what the engineers had to say about the work and the work environment. But I was also struck by the total lack of women there.

Percent Of Female Engineers By Year​

Year	Female Engineers	Male Engineers	Percentage Female Engineers	Percentage Male Engineers
2019	389	2,059	15.9%	84.1%
2018	321	1,718	15.8%	84.2%
2017	320	1,610	16.6%	83.4%
2016	274	1,687	14.0%	86.0%
2015	279	1,511	15.6%	84.4%
2014	245	1,450	14.5%	85.5%
2013	222	1,494	13.0%	87.0%
2012	210	1,324	13.7%	86.3%
2011	152	1,262	10.8%	89.2%
2010	231	1,307	15.0%	85.0%

Source : What percentage of Engineers are female?

 

[Bet TSLA]

Percent Of Female Engineers By Year​

Year	Female Engineers	Male Engineers	Percentage Female Engineers	Percentage Male Engineers
2019	389	2,059	15.9%	84.1%
2018	321	1,718	15.8%	84.2%
2017	320	1,610	16.6%	83.4%
2016	274	1,687	14.0%	86.0%
2015	279	1,511	15.6%	84.4%
2014	245	1,450	14.5%	85.5%
2013	222	1,494	13.0%	87.0%
2012	210	1,324	13.7%	86.3%
2011	152	1,262	10.8%	89.2%
2010	231	1,307	15.0%	85.0%

Source : What percentage of Engineers are female?

These numbers are only vaguely relevant.

I'm talking about the Tesla Optimus team. They made a recruiting video. It showed not a single female. If there was a female on the team she would have been in the recruiting video. Tesla presumably gets the best engineers around, at least those who are happy with working all the time.

So I'm disappointed to see that there aren't a significant number of women on the team.

 

[CLK350]

I thought Boston Dynamics has also mastered robots locomotion especially walking. So this isn’t breaking new territory

Shows you completely misunderstand Optimus and Tesla AI technology.

Maybe a good analogy would be dictation pre Google 2015 revolutionary advance, clunky rule based dictation remember Dragon word recognition ....

The Surprising History of Machine Translation

Have you ever wondered where Google Translate came from? Let's take a deeper look at the History of Google Translate and see where it is going

acutrans.com

 

[SmokyPeat]

These numbers are only vaguely relevant.

I'm talking about the Tesla Optimus team. They made a recruiting video. It showed not a single female. If there was a female on the team she would have been in the recruiting video. Tesla presumably gets the best engineers around, at least those who are happy with working all the time.

So I'm disappointed to see that there aren't a significant number of women on the team.

I've seen at least one woman on the Optimus team. There are certainly more that I haven't seen. I wouldn't worry about it.

Tesla just shocked everyone with its Optimus robot prototype | Digital Trends

Tesla gave an impressive robotics demonstration, proving that the Optimus robot is a serious effort that might change the way work is done in the future.

www-digitaltrends-com.cdn.ampproject.org

 

[CorneliusXX]

Anyone have the expertise to hazard a guess at what China ending covid zero would do short term to demand for energy and raw materials and how that would impact inflation? My gut tells me it would be bad but I may not be fully thinking it through?

Presumably when China opens up they will go through the pandemic like the rest of the world did. The probably won't have as many serious cases as other countries did at the time because they are vaccinated but it will still rip through the country.

 

[SmokyPeat]

Presumably when China opens up they will go through the pandemic like the rest of the world did. The probably won't have as many serious cases as other countries did at the time because they are vaccinated but it will still rip through the country.

Maybe, but it will likely be the far less deadly omicron variant.

 

[jw934]

I'm curious what practical ramifications you see if FSD is released to all purchasers soon? To my way of thinking, it will allow some revenue recognition but that is a one-time thing, with the addition of new FSD purchases being recognized immediately. Yes, that's a lot of revenue but do you have any insight how this is a milestone beyond a book-keeping change?

I suppose it could be taken as general indicator that Tesla thinks it's good enough to increase the user base, but I don't put a lot of weight into it being a strong indicator of progress because I believe they could have gone wide release without too much problem when they decided to use the "Safety Score" (as long as Tesla implemented strong controls to verify users were paying attention and not abusing the system). I think the reason they didn't do that was simply to see how a smaller subset of their customers would get along with it before increasing the user base. Do you think I'm missing something?

In short, I think it could create the appearance of more progress than it actually necessarily indicates. Of course, maybe it will be more improved than I think. Even in that case, I think it's just as possible to hit a technological wall after wide release as before, and end up stalled, without the being able to achieve good progress on "the march of nines" without a fresh approach. I don't like being negative, but my observations make me think the improvements are slowing down, not going exponential as I previously expected. It's already amazing in its capability but it's still a long, long, long, ways from driving unsupervised without getting hung up. I believe I previously under-estimated how difficult it would be to get the last little bit of needed improvement to be fully autonomous.

I wonder if the reason for the wide release of FSD is to continue the March of the 9’s.

Does the March of the 9’s mean the gathering of the edge case data will soon require sample size that is possible only from a wide release?

As for the timing, even after a wide release Tesla needs time to for the edge cases to happen, then gather and create training data sets as well as to validate training system updates for these edge cases.

As we, and Elon, have said, no one is even close to Tesla, especially if the robotaxi government certification implies the need for edge case data gathered from a hundred thousand data collecting cars and human drivers on the real road over an extended period, especially through the weather and road conditions of the winter months.

 

[Artful Dodger]

This thread is becoming the Twitter thread again. One of those is more than enough (and more than a sane person can handle). Take it there. I’m going to start wielding the axe again.

Thank-you! Can we please now all get back to discussing @Ryan27 's wife??

/S

 

[elasalle]

Presumably when China opens up they will go through the pandemic like the rest of the world did. The probably won't have as many serious cases as other countries did at the time because they are vaccinated but it will still rip through the country.

China will vaccinate before opening
Problem seems to be that they haven’t approved any mRNA vaccines. German leaders were in China recently to try and get BioNTech vaccine approved

Things move slowly in China so hope the closed loop works for Tesla …

 

[cliff harris]

I think that the industry experts didn't quite get the Minimum Viable Product concept.

This is so true. I work in software, and getting the first version of your product in the hands of customers is EVERYTHING. If bits of it suck, you will find out right away, if bits need improving, you will find out right away. You get deluged with actual helpful feedback from real world customers. (and in the case of optimus, those customers may be internal- factory managers, and thats fine).

I bet there were a LOT of robotics engineers who could see exactly where optimus was going wrong, and spotting mistakes they thought Tesla were making. AWESOME! those people may well apply for a job to 'show tesla how its done'. This is 100% working as intended.
Only really arrogant, stupid companies try to completely perfect a product without ever involving the customer and then just magically 'reveal' that product on day one

Sometimes that means the whole world telling you they still wanted a headphone jack...

 

[replicant]

I would have attached the whole article but it's paywalled.

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I also bookmarked this thread with /unread path, added "tm" as a keyword so I can type "tm" in the address bar and go directly to the last unread post. /unread works with any other TMC thread. Firefox bookmarks' keywords works with any URL and custom searches:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/o3yfeo

 

[OrthoSurg]

PhD in biomechanics here.

A bent knee offers better ability to balance.

A straighter knee reduces energy. Humans have better motor control so can better optimize for the latter.

I’d offer more detail, but I don’t want to ruin my reputation on this forum.

The human knee has a screw home mecanism where the tibia goes in external rotation compared to the femoral condyles. The geometry of the tibial plateau makes it easier and effortless to stay standing with a locked knees in full extension.

When running you never go into full extension because you need your knee to using biarticular muscles like the hamstrings and the gastrocnemius to bounce and recoil 17% if the energy stored in the buarticular tendon collagen for more effective bouncing while running.

Optimus will never have a normal gait if they don’t force it to walk like a human being. If they use actuation motors in the joints there is no reason to reproduce a screw home mechanism as the motors just lock the joint in the desired position without having a muscle or tendon to fatigue to keep a joint in a desired position from a prolonged period of time.

This was also a publication I have made and presented on during my masters degree in training so I had to share that useless knowledge I have not used for over a decade.

Thank you for listening to me