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

[StarFoxisDown!]

The advanced manufacturing credits are based on kWh not packs produced so how does that help?

Isn't there two different credits? One for cell production in kWh and then another for battery modules?

 

[Gigapress]

Well this cleaned up quickly. I hope this improvement is sustained. Still going to focus on essays though.

Update: It was not sustained entirely yesterday, although it has seemed to improve. Here’s my last post on this topic.

To be clear, I already have obvious trolls on ignore. The current problem is that:

1) People (including me at times) respond to them to refute the BS, and TMC does not have a function for ignoring these replies​

​

2) More importantly, even useful members whom I don't want to put on ignore apparently are unable or unwilling to put their stuff in the appropriate threads.​

Among us we have doctors, engineers, scientists, financiers, accountants and other knowledgeable people, most of whom are twice my age and who have one, two, three or even four orders of magnitude more wealth than I had last year with TSLA at $400. Despite this potential for great content that attracted me and others here in the first place, evidently this year and this last month in particular it has been more compelling for some to whine and complain (with prolific post volume) about how much money they've lost and go off topic with low-value chatter. Reddit and Twitter are great places for that, and this thread is not. This is the one portion of the internet I've found where we can have a small group of elite and well-informed investors, and currently this behavioral tendency of the group is making this forum increasingly toxic and less valuable. Toxicity and low-value content can have a self-reinforcing feedback loop because it drives away those not interested in being around it.

Reminder:

NO ONE IS STOPPING YOU FROM SHARING YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS TOPIC. IF YOU THINK YOUR OPINIONS ARE IMPORTANT TO SHARE THEN FEEL FREE TO DO SO -- IN AN APPROPRIATE LOCATION.

I like this post from yesterday:

That is, nonetheless, very good advice. Despite the huge drop in share price I still am in an arena for which capital gains would seriously outweigh alternative choices. One benefit of HODL is ignoring the lows because the highs will also come. Were the fundamentals of TSLA not so compelling I would have a different story.

All of us should calmly review the future prospects of TSLA. If anyone thinks the prospects are bleak, liquidate or short the stock, or both. If thinking the prospects are positive HODL. As nearly all of us know by now, leveraged 'investing' or otherwise 'investing' in derivatives does expose risks greater than are the potential profits. For those who choose to do that, please do not expect commiseration in this thread.

We have many people who are feeling a trifle desperate just now. They are now populating the entire thread with their complaints. This thread is meant to be about investing, not speculation. There are other threads for speculation; please use them.

Here, please keep on the subject. We are in serious risk of using all the goodwill, and have our stellar contributors such as @Gigapress, @The Accountant and others leave. That is pretty much what happened a few years ago, too.

I've been though this since 2012 in one guise or another. Many of us have done that.
For every one who's happy polluting the forum with nonsense just keep in mind that those who actually provide content are leaving now. Is that what you want? If so keep it up.

Scatology, idiotic quotations, photos of pulchritude, all that fits well with Tinder. Keep it gone here. All the irrelevant commentary about unrelated subjects should be placed on different sites, not this one.

Then last week has had nearly no useful content. Everyone serious has limits.
Even the original creator of this thread has limits.

I recommend any of the other public sites, content free as policy. You'll be happier there.

The rest of us want to discuss TSLA and maybe a bit of SpaceX.

Let’s talk about demand and brand now. The hypothesis is that Elon’s Antics are causing big problems. The data backing this belief has been almost entirely comprised of intuitions, conjecture and anecdotal experiences.

Anecdotes are inherently biased, non-representative samples, which makes them worse than useless because they can lead to illusions and false conclusions. They’re a good starting point for an investigation but that’s it. Sharing yet another personal story about some people in your social circle who have a certain opinion or countering someone else's story with an anecdote about people with an opposing opinion is at best a pointless waste of space in a thread that's already too cluttered. Our goal ought to be lower quantity and higher quality because this increases efficiency for readers and makes it more likely that new people with good thoughts and knowledge will decide to participate after discovering this thread. That’s how we turn this into a positive feedback loop. As Tesla becomes increasingly mainstream over the years, maintaining discipline on this will become increasingly important to prevent the TMC investment community from devolving into chaos.

Now…Tesla has complete, up-to-the-minute information on order flow, tesla.com traffic, job applications, social media metrics, employee engagement etc. You know who doesn't have this data? You and I. At best we have proxies like Google search interest and Tesla.com estimated order delivery lead times.

So, why speculate? Surely by now Tesla, and Elon himself, would have been alerted to the existence of a major brand or demand problem caused by Elon’s Antics. Either that or they are witnessing a problem yet Elon is, nevertheless, pushing forward with what he's been up to lately. It seems pretty unlikely that the same man who spent years sleeping on the factory floor working intense 100-hour weeks to keep this company's mission alive would ignore clear, unambiguous warning signals just so that he can post tweets about Ye and Trump and argue with American politicians in public. Do we really believe he's that irrational and that bad at prioritization AND the Tesla board isn’t intervening? Do we believe he’s inexplicably switched from his normal tendency to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and his usual willingness to admit he’s wrong and change course when presented with compelling evidence that his prior decisions were mistaken? Are the board members just Musk sycophants who aren’t all-in on the mission?

Elon has pulled off what I view as a miracle: Gentrifying Mordor. Texas, which has an oil & gas industry that in isolation would put it in 4th place globally ahead of all other countries except the rest of the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia, actually rolled out the red carpet for a factory for electric cars and batteries. Tesla brought a massive Trojan horse deep in the heart of Texas and plopped it 20 minutes away from the State Capitol. In doing so, Tesla and Elon also gave Texan elected officials a way to save face with their voters even while Tesla systematically dismantles the largest industry in Texas with deep ties to the local culture, history and economy. This same industry is the largest donor to the current governing party in the state (excluding retiree lobbying which donates roughly evenly to both parties). Just a few years ago, certain demographics tended to view Elon as a socialist, tree-hugging, subsidy-chasing fraudster whose businesses were staying afloat only thanks to government support and Virtue-Signaling Coastal Elites with more money than sense. Now we have the Governor of Texas himself on Fox News praising Elon and Tesla and hyping Texan solar and wind leadership. I think people still are deeply underappreciating the significance of this shift. I never thought I’d see something like this.

Meanwhile, we still see Tesla setting new auto sales records quarter after quarter in California, up about 130% since 2019 which was right before Elon made a notable rightward shift in his public political commentary. Tesla’s YTD California market share is 11% which is 2nd only to Toyota with the gap rapidly closing. Most of this Tesla sales volume is going to the LA, SF and San Diego metro areas. News flash: These are some of the most liberal-leaning areas in the entire USA. I see similar statistical results in the Seattle metro area: Seattle and Bellevue are chock full of Teslas with more and more every year, but outside of King County the frequency drops off precipitously. If the American Left is abandoning Tesla now out of outrage and wanting to cancel Elon Musk, then why do they as a demographic keep buying so many cars (and solar panels and batteries) from Tesla, and why did the Democrat-controlled federal government recently make a law that will, if left untouched until expiry in 2032, funnel hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies to Tesla's bank account? Would someone whining and moaning about politics explain how this happened? I was under the impression that the dramatic move of Tesla HQ from California to Texas and lack of public comment on Texas’s abortion law last year was supposed to cause demand collapse and challenges hiring qualified workforce in Austin, yet here we are with Giga Texas already almost caught up with Giga Berlin. With respect to Tesla’s business outcomes, it was a big nothingburger.

Here's another mindblowing fact: a product can be economically successful without 100% of the population liking it. Only the people that actually are going to buy it need to like it, and it doesn’t really matter much if a given individual has passive disinterest or active dislike because either way they aren’t buying. This is a basic principle of marketing. Counterintuitively, controversy can actually increase net demand by attracting attention and conversation, especially for a consumer product with no paid advertising and general lack of public awareness of the value proposition the product offers to consumers. The fact that orders in America doubled overnight after this year’s Superbowl EV ad blitz despite no special actions on Tesla’s part is a strong statistical indicator that most people still don’t know much about the product and anything even indirectly attracting attention has the power to increase sales. Does anyone have a TSLA investment thesis that requires anything approaching 100% global car market share to justify an expectation that the stock is undervalued? I certainly don't.

Next year, Tesla is going to set an all-time record for car company profits with 3% global market share. 10 million vehicles per year in 2030 would be about 10% of the total market if we assume that it will recover and return to the long-term growth trend. Even if we believe the HIGHLY EXAGGERATED estimates of 50% of the car-buying population being permanently alienated from ever buying a Tesla and making their own lives substantially worse just to avoid association with Elon, then Tesla would just need to capture 20% of the remaining half and that seems doable to me.

Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are compelling comparisons. Jeff Bezos is currently quite unpopular yet that hasn’t stopped Amazon from dominating e-commerce and cloud computing. Bill Gates was unpopular while running Microsoft yet that didn’t stop the domination of personal computing and office productivity software. Mark Zuckerberg is even less popular than Bezos and Gates but Facebook/Instagram still developed into a social media empire. At the end of the day the product’s value proposition is what matters and people will find a way to justify buying it if they want it enough.

If you would like to reply to this post then please do it in the politics or Twitter threads.

 

[Gigapress]

Isn't there two different credits? One for cell production in kWh and then another for battery modules?

There are but both are calculated per kWh.

However, the $7500 vehicle credit is per vehicle so in that sense there is a big subsidy advantage to selling more standard range 4680 cars. And that was kind of the ostensible goal of the law: to subsidize more affordable EVs.

 

[Nocturnal]

So far at least, the data does not agree with Troy or James's numbers

- Berlin production and deliveries tracking for way higher than Troy's numbers.
- Shanghai deliveries are WAY ahead of Troy's numbers. His latest was 104k deliveries for China.....Tesla is already at 56k, will be at 70k before Dec begins. So you really expect Tesla to only sell 30k in Dec? Sure ok
- Shanghai production is trending above his estimates - 87k in Oct, seems to be on track of 90-92k in Nov, 92k in Dec (270k total)
-No registration data to confirm, but anecdotal evidence of Austin factory + Tesla's own words about production rates says that Austin production/deliveries will be materially higher than Troy's estimates.

But sure, keep sourcing Troy

But again, one of the main reasons Q4 will be pivotal is that it's on track to be first quarter of smooth production/deliveries since Q1 + Berlin/Austin will be at volume levels where they aren't dragging on gross margin/operation margin. Yes Berlin/Austin achieved positive gross margins in Q3, but they were still a dragging down total gross margin average considerably and were especially hard on operating margin.

I think Q4 is also important for pure morale reasons. Tesla retail holders have been hit hard this year and have had to deal with a lot of swirl around Elon, Twitter, etc. Just look at the board here. Hodlers need a win.

There are but both are calculated per kWh.

However, the $7500 vehicle credit is per vehicle so in that sense there is a big subsidy advantage to selling more standard range 4680 cars. And that was kind of the ostensible goal of the law: to subsidize more affordable EVs.

I think many of us got excited about promises of density and performance and neglected pure volume. I've been pointing out for a bit now that it doesn't even really matter is Tesla can't built a better cell than the rest, as long as they can build a lot of them for cheap.

 

[thesmokingman]

Added some chairs cuz chairs! But gdamn, the downward pressure is ridiculous.

 

[thx1139]

There are but both are calculated per kWh.

However, the $7500 vehicle credit is per vehicle so in that sense there is a big subsidy advantage to selling more standard range 4680 cars. And that was kind of the ostensible goal of the law: to subsidize more affordable EVs.

Only way Tesla takes more advantage of that is if they can build more Model Y SR than Model Y LR. If the limit is the limit then dont think Tesla will do anything to push SR. If you can only build 1000 Model Y then try to make as many with higher margins as possible,

 

[Christine69420]

Bought a few at 170. I don’t need them. Already have enough to see myself through retirement. But since they’re giving them away.

Had to sell a few today because of the house I just bought. I am glad to hear that they found a good home!

It's a weird place to be in selling at this level. But I have tried to space the selling out in time - dollar value averaging was the theory - but I'm not sure about the average part when each sell is at a lower level than the one before. Still - it's well worth it - trading some shares for some new chairs.

 

[Mike Ambler]

This is the one portion of the internet I've found where we can have a small group of elite and well-informed investors, and currently this behavioral tendency of the group is making this forum increasingly toxic and less valuable

Mike, despite reading every post since 2016, has a tiny reaction score.
Mike uses the like/helpful/informative/funny buttons massively.
Mike often thinks of a good reply, reads forward a bit, sees someone has responded more eloquently than he would have, so hits the like button.
Mike has saved the community probably 1000s of "never sent" posts.

....be (a bit more) like Mike!
(maybe likes etc should be included in the reaction score)

Edit: this is meant to reinforce what @Gigapress is saying about the high quality posts, not to poke at him!
Mod edit: I can attest Mike is indeed one of TMC’s very most prolific users of such “buttons”

 

[AudubonB]

At first I perked up my ears, but then realized, Ho Hum. I’ve been driving by the seat of my pants for decades.

 

[Gigapress]

Only way Tesla takes more advantage of that is if they can build more Model Y SR than Model Y LR.

This may be true next year because company guidance is that battery supply will be the limiting factor in 2023 and beyond.

 

[elasalle]

Jan 23 250's for $1.07 -- for those who think Q4 gonna be big

 

[phantasms]

Not advice, a warning. Trading around the VIX has been super successful for most this year. TSLA is very low and hammered right now but ES is nearing strong support and the VIX is nearing 20 which has been a solid sell/short signal all year. You all do you but, unbelievably, I think we are about to get really really hammered, and yes, I'll be buying.

p.s. I hope this ages very poorly. lol. SP:169.2

 

[AudubonB]

We’re coming up to the USA Thanksgiving, not Halloween, time, but here is the Ghoul Report of the day:

Nikola is about to crash through the $1 billion market cap level, ‘tho from the wrong direction. At $2.29 and a Mkt Cap of $1.097 Bn as I type this, it’s knock knock knocking on the basement door.

 

[larmor]

Mercedes planning to charge a subscription for their EVs for acceleration: so suv will do 0-60 from 6.2 sec to 5.2... Yeah tesla sucks, i get it.

Mercedes will unlock your $100,000 electric car's full power — for an extra $1,200 per year

The pricy add-on boosts power output and helps cars hit 60 mph up to a full second quicker, and is part of a growing trend among automakers.

www.yahoo.com

 

[thesmokingman]

Mercedes planning to charge a subscription for their EVs for acceleration: so suv will do 0-60 from 6.2 sec to 5.2... Yeah tesla sucks, i get it.

Mercedes will unlock your $100,000 electric car's full power — for an extra $1,200 per year

The pricy add-on boosts power output and helps cars hit 60 mph up to a full second quicker, and is part of a growing trend among automakers.

www.yahoo.com

Yea lol, saw that in the ev forum/ MB thread. Someone was actually defending MB on this, yore saving money! Nevermind that its a subscription lmao.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Update: It was not sustained entirely yesterday, although it has seemed to improve. Here’s my last post on this topic.

To be clear, I already have obvious trolls on ignore. The current problem is that:

1) People (including me at times) respond to them to refute the BS, and TMC does not have a function for ignoring these replies​

​

2) More importantly, even useful members whom I don't want to put on ignore apparently are unable or unwilling to put their stuff in the appropriate threads.​

Among us we have doctors, engineers, scientists, financiers, accountants and other knowledgeable people, most of whom are twice my age and who have one, two, three or even four orders of magnitude more wealth than I had last year with TSLA at $400. Despite this potential for great content that attracted me and others here in the first place, evidently this year and this last month in particular it has been more compelling for some to whine and complain (with prolific post volume) about how much money they've lost and go off topic with low-value chatter. Reddit and Twitter are great places for that, and this thread is not. This is the one portion of the internet I've found where we can have a small group of elite and well-informed investors, and currently this behavioral tendency of the group is making this forum increasingly toxic and less valuable. Toxicity and low-value content can have a self-reinforcing feedback loop because it drives away those not interested in being around it.

Reminder:


I like this post from yesterday:


Let’s talk about demand and brand now. The hypothesis is that Elon’s Antics are causing big problems. The data backing this belief has been almost entirely comprised of intuitions, conjecture and anecdotal experiences.

Anecdotes are inherently biased, non-representative samples, which makes them worse than useless because they can lead to illusions and false conclusions. They’re a good starting point for an investigation but that’s it. Sharing yet another personal story about some people in your social circle who have a certain opinion or countering someone else's story with an anecdote about people with an opposing opinion is at best a pointless waste of space in a thread that's already too cluttered. Our goal ought to be lower quantity and higher quality because this increases efficiency for readers and makes it more likely that new people with good thoughts and knowledge will decide to participate after discovering this thread. That’s how we turn this into a positive feedback loop. As Tesla becomes increasingly mainstream over the years, maintaining discipline on this will become increasingly important to prevent the TMC investment community from devolving into chaos.

Now…Tesla has complete, up-to-the-minute information on order flow, tesla.com traffic, job applications, social media metrics, employee engagement etc. You know who doesn't have this data? You and I. At best we have proxies like Google search interest and Tesla.com estimated order delivery lead times.

So, why speculate? Surely by now Tesla, and Elon himself, would have been alerted to the existence of a major brand or demand problem caused by Elon’s Antics. Either that or they are witnessing a problem yet Elon is, nevertheless, pushing forward with what he's been up to lately. It seems pretty unlikely that the same man who spent years sleeping on the factory floor working intense 100-hour weeks to keep this company's mission alive would ignore clear, unambiguous warning signals just so that he can post tweets about Ye and Trump and argue with American politicians in public. Do we really believe he's that irrational and that bad at prioritization AND the Tesla board isn’t intervening? Do we believe he’s inexplicably switched from his normal tendency to avoid the sunk cost fallacy and his usual willingness to admit he’s wrong and change course when presented with compelling evidence that his prior decisions were mistaken? Are the board members just Musk sycophants who aren’t all-in on the mission?

Elon has pulled off what I view as a miracle: Gentrifying Mordor. Texas, which has an oil & gas industry that in isolation would put it in 4th place globally ahead of all other countries except the rest of the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia, actually rolled out the red carpet for a factory for electric cars and batteries. Tesla brought a massive Trojan horse deep in the heart of Texas and plopped it 20 minutes away from the State Capitol. In doing so, Tesla and Elon also gave Texan elected officials a way to save face with their voters even while Tesla systematically dismantles the largest industry in Texas with deep ties to the local culture, history and economy. This same industry is the largest donor to the current governing party in the state (excluding retiree lobbying which donates roughly evenly to both parties). Just a few years ago, certain demographics tended to view Elon as a socialist, tree-hugging, subsidy-chasing fraudster whose businesses were staying afloat only thanks to government support and Virtue-Signaling Coastal Elites with more money than sense. Now we have the Governor of Texas himself on Fox News praising Elon and Tesla and hyping Texan solar and wind leadership. I think people still are deeply underappreciating the significance of this shift. I never thought I’d see something like this.

Meanwhile, we still see Tesla setting new auto sales records quarter after quarter in California, up about 130% since 2019 which was right before Elon made a notable rightward shift in his public political commentary. Tesla’s YTD California market share is 11% which is 2nd only to Toyota with the gap rapidly closing. Most of this Tesla sales volume is going to the LA, SF and San Diego metro areas. News flash: These are some of the most liberal-leaning areas in the entire USA. I see similar statistical results in the Seattle metro area: Seattle and Bellevue are chock full of Teslas with more and more every year, but outside of King County the frequency drops off precipitously. If the American Left is abandoning Tesla now out of outrage and wanting to cancel Elon Musk, then why do they as a demographic keep buying so many cars (and solar panels and batteries) from Tesla, and why did the Democrat-controlled federal government recently make a law that will, if left untouched until expiry in 2032, funnel hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies to Tesla's bank account? Would someone whining and moaning about politics explain how this happened? I was under the impression that the dramatic move of Tesla HQ from California to Texas and lack of public comment on Texas’s abortion law last year was supposed to cause demand collapse and challenges hiring qualified workforce in Austin, yet here we are with Giga Texas already almost caught up with Giga Berlin. With respect to Tesla’s business outcomes, it was a big nothingburger.

Here's another mindblowing fact: a product can be economically successful without 100% of the population liking it. Only the people that actually are going to buy it need to like it, and it doesn’t really matter much if a given individual has passive disinterest or active dislike because either way they aren’t buying. This is a basic principle of marketing. Counterintuitively, controversy can actually increase net demand by attracting attention and conversation, especially for a consumer product with no paid advertising and general lack of public awareness of the value proposition the product offers to consumers. The fact that orders in America doubled overnight after this year’s Superbowl EV ad blitz despite no special actions on Tesla’s part is a strong statistical indicator that most people still don’t know much about the product and anything even indirectly attracting attention has the power to increase sales. Does anyone have a TSLA investment thesis that requires anything approaching 100% global car market share to justify an expectation that the stock is undervalued? I certainly don't.

Next year, Tesla is going to set an all-time record for car company profits with 3% global market share. 10 million vehicles per year in 2030 would be about 10% of the total market if we assume that it will recover and return to the long-term growth trend. Even if we believe the HIGHLY EXAGGERATED estimates of 50% of the car-buying population being permanently alienated from ever buying a Tesla and making their own lives substantially worse just to avoid association with Elon, then Tesla would just need to capture 20% of the remaining half and that seems doable to me.

Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are compelling comparisons. Jeff Bezos is currently quite unpopular yet that hasn’t stopped Amazon from dominating e-commerce and cloud computing. Bill Gates was unpopular while running Microsoft yet that didn’t stop the domination of personal computing and office productivity software. Mark Zuckerberg is even less popular than Bezos and Gates but Facebook/Instagram still developed into a social media empire. At the end of the day the product’s value proposition is what matters and people will find a way to justify buying it if they want it enough.

If you would like to reply to this post then please do it in the politics or Twitter threads.

Great write-up. Would fit well in the Merit Thread, but I’m afraid we would then really be forced to rename it the Gigapress Thread

Mod: Oops, I copied it over. --ggr

Your decision yesterday to post less because of the Twitter (and other) clutter woke me up from hibernation. It would be a huge loss to the community we have here. So I decided to help out and moved 60 posts to the Twitter thread where they belong.

I will continue doing so (or deleting them) when I’m online. But it needs to stop. So from now on I reserve the right to send people on a three day vacation if they reintroduce the subject in this thread, or on even longer vacations for repeat offenses.

 

[Fairchild]

Not advice, a warning. Trading around the VIX has been super successful for most this year. TSLA is very low and hammered right now but ES is nearing strong support and the VIX is nearing 20 which has been a solid sell/short signal all year. You all do you but, unbelievably, I think we are about to get really really hammered, and yes, I'll be buying.

No doubt TSLA heading for that strong support at $150 with the 50 SMA. It hurt, but I was out at $230 and will catch it on the way back up (a month perhaps?). In the meantime, a shiny penny stock US Critical Metals (USCMF) has absorbed a chunk of my TSLA holdings and is up 47.37% over one month. Risky, but fun.

First China demand dropped. Tesla China stores closed largely due to competition. Now, US delivery times have dropped 40-60% on most models. Some would say it's not related to the demand or Musk mouth, but to more efficient factories. Time will tell.

 

[Right_Said_Fred]

Now, US delivery times have dropped 40-60% on most models. Some would say it's not related to the demand or Musk mouth, but to more efficient factories. Time will tell.

There’s a more likely reason: US buyers postponing their orders until after January 1st because of the $7500 credit.

 

[bkp_duke]

No doubt TSLA heading for that strong support at $150 with the 50 SMA. It hurt, but I was out at $230 and will catch it on the way back up (a month perhaps?). In the meantime, a shiny penny stock US Critical Metals (USCMF) has absorbed a chunk of my TSLA holdings and is up 47.37% over one month. Risky, but fun.

First China demand dropped. Tesla China stores closed largely due to competition. Now, US delivery times have dropped 40-60% on most models. Some would say it's not related to the demand or Musk mouth, but to more efficient factories. Time will tell.

We just had the best insurance registrations for China . . . ever. Sales are tracking out in China to be potentially a record for both LOCAL sales and EXPORTS.

 

[bkp_duke]

There’s a more likely reason: US buyers postponing their orders until after January 1st because of the $7500 credit.

Some are, for sure. Seen this first hand with my BIL (but then he turned around 2 days later and bought a CPO that came off lease, lol).

But what it is doing is giving everyone that knows they won't qualify for the credit a legit reason to "jump the line".

The income restrictions on the IRA mean that there are still a LOT of people in the upper middle class that don't qualify for the tax credit, know this, and will happily take delivery now.