TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[BenPrice]

Copy Paste letter to SEC

Hi.

Your mission statement is as follows:

The mission of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.

Your actions against Tesla, Inc, are in direct disobedience to your mission.

You’ve failed to protect investors. By leaking news about Tesla, Inc., you created more volume and greater change in SP than the “crime” you’re attempting to prosecute.

By engaging in a legal semantics battle with Elon Musk while the opposing viewpoint Is actively fabricating facts out of thin air and spreading them to millions of potential investors, you are not maintaining a fair, orderly, or efficient market. You’ve made it absurdly unfair, disorderly, and inefficient.

And by rushing an investigation for a fiscal year end you are not facilitating efficient capital formation. No regulatory investigation of any substance has time frame boundaries based on fiscal years. Your charges against Elon’s Musk are semantics at best, and you lack any substantial evidence to make your claims stick in front of an impartial judge.

It is understood that Tesla’s enemies have deep pockets: the trillion dollar oil and gas industry, the trillion dollar automobile industry, the trillion dollar GDP of industrialized nations....and the SEC of the United States of America has elected to side with the greedy, often foreign money to hinder American innovation.

Your actions are hostile against the country you serve and the species you belong to. You’ve failed to follow any portion of your mission. You are corrupt shills.

You will be exposed and it will never be forgotten, never forgiven.

 

[MP3Mike]

You do not need to make this personal.

The fact is that when an individual signs up for some internet-based service this includes agreeing to terms in a wording so lengthy and difficult to understand that it has its own name, legalese.

I was just trying to point out that unless they have actually read the terms and found that their broker has made them agree to having their securities lent out that they are "making a mountain out of a spec of dust." (And yes I have read the terms of my broker and they can only lend out my shares up to the margin balance in my account, which is exactly none.)

They want to petition Tesla to create a new broker to do what is very likely unnecessary for most people. (At least for people here in the US.)

 

[MarcusMaximus]

Your charges against Elon’s Musk

Wait, were they going after a perfume company?

On a more serious note: if you want them to take your note to heart at all, I’d drop the last 2 paragraphs(feel free to leave them here). I still doubt they will, but the insults are sure to shut out any reception at all.

 

[M3Rider]

Thanks for auditioning. We'll call you if we need you.

Believe it or not, I bought few shares today(on margin). I'm going to hold others long term. One is not an obstacle for another. I just don't want to create a god for myself while supporting the mission.
I find Galileo Russel's position on tweets he tried to communicate to Musk a much more productive and honest approach. Compared to "buy at any price, we saw it all and pre-approve anything and everything Elon wants to say".

 

[SOULPEDL]

He has how many days as Chair + CEO (45 days - a week or so)? Is it even conceivable that he's driving SP down on purpose to take it private before the board can stop him? I think I'll put this date on my calendar, we're going private (IMHO)!

Yes a crazy theory, so what's the counter argument on this, I would honestly like to know. He could just claim he lost sleep and got emotional, sorry...

Copy Paste letter to SEC

We might actually see this.

 

[Xpert]

I was worried about this, but it appears Elon's tweets are his personal opinion and will NOT affect the settlement with SEC - say former SEC chair. in other words they aren't illegal and this was nothing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/musks-tweets-are-dangerous-says-former-sec-chair-harvey-pitt.html
Musk's tweets are 'precipitous, mercurial and dangerous,' says former SEC chair Harvey Pitt

Now his venting is over I hope he can get back to work. On a more exciting news, Autopilot V9 is rolling out...

 

[SO16]

people are discounting how much he's hurting perception of himself and the brand. musk in particular comes off as a man child to people that don't know the details.

Only to people who want to see it that way.

 

[AlexS]

He is on Twitter now, keep your seat belts tight

He = Elon

 

[lklundin]

where’s the bottom over the next few days?
246?
229?

If I could reliably predict that, I would by now be so wealthy that I would have lost all interest in trading...

 

[avoigt]

I believe this chard describes the sentiment some people here are in pretty well.

The higher the implied discount rate is the better I feel. What was it what Elon said about volatility ?

Thanks to @SBenson

 

[pdq]

Perspective:

In 2015, there were 339 BMW dealerships in the US for 346,023 vehicles sold. That amounts to 1,020 BMWs sold per dealership, per year. That’s just 2.79 cars per day, and that’s BMW-only dealerships (I think). [Source]

In 2015, there were 187 Audi-exclusive dealerships selling 202,202 vehicles. That amounts to 1,081 Audi’s sold per dealership, per year. That’s just 2.96 cars per day. [Source]

In 2011(slightly older data, but the concepts still apply), GM sold about 2.2M vehicles in the US from about 5,000 dealerships, or about 440/yr or 1.2 cars per day. Ford sold 1.9M from around 4000 dealers. Or 475/yr or 1.3 cars per day. [Source]

In Q3, Tesla will deliver roughly 70,000 US/Canada vehicles (all M3s plus I dunno, 60-70% S/X deliveries) from (as far as I can tell) about 82 service centers in the US and Canada (Few deliveries from stores and galleries, and a small percentage of home deliveries). That’s an annual rate of about 3,414 cars per service center, or about 9.3 per day. And this will get a little bigger next quarter (perhaps roughly 85,000 vehicles from 85 service centers, or 4000/yr or almost 11 cars per day.

And of course since most of these deliveries are happening toward the tail of the quarter, their current rate is probably 2 to 20 times that, depending on the service center.

Step back a moment.

Perspective.

In a quarter or two, Tesla’s Cars Delivered Per ‘Dealership’ metric (we in the biz call that the CDPD, not to be confused with the, uh, Chicago Department of Planning and Development) instantly went from less than competitors to 4-5 TIMES the rate of the other carmakers. (Disclaimer: I’m not in the biz).

We’re talking 8-9 TIMES the delivery rate of GM/Ford dealerships in 2011.

These are all rough numbers because I don’t care enough to do heavy research on it, but things we can extract from the above data:

1. Tesla’s cars sold per facility is several times higher than competitors. That means higher capital efficiency. (Yes, I know dealerships aren’t owned by the OEMs. Roll with me here).
2. This also means the service centers are crazy busy, and Tesla will need to smooth out their process a bit to improve the delivery experience.

Having said that, you have to admit that’s pretty remarkable. I know some are less forgiving and Tesla should have been better prepared knowing delivery volumes would ramp like this, but...

Damn. That’s pretty remarkable.

It’s easy to see why they’re swamped. That’s a big adjustment, and likely Tesla was worried about spending too much capital in advance to prepare for it. Personally, I’m willing to give them a little time to adjust and smooth things out. I hope most customers understand and are patient.

Cars sold per service center is an absolutely worthless metric. What is more important is the number of annual unit sales and the amount of profit made per vehicle sold.

And, the local MB dealership I used to use averages 400+ new car sales per month, or roughly 5,000 per year. Multiply that times the number of MB dealerships, and then realize that they make money on each car sold.

 

[HopJokey]

He is on Twitter now, keep your seat belts tight

He = Elon

Seems harmless, retweets of Tesla twitter account of the new v9 software update.

 

[Smokey4141]

Wouldn’t it be better for him to focus on the business at hand rather than picking fights and ending up in so many headlines?

These drops are self-inflicted and destroy value. This impacts all of us longs and everyone who has been working so hard on the Model 3.

It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to be CEO anymore.

I know this will get downvotes, but these past two months have been sad especially with the backdrop of greater production and deliveries.

No down-vote from me, this is exactly right...
If Elon focuses on running a car company, producing cars, making profits, and paying his bills, all the other silliness goes away and doesn't matter... Actually, I should call it "damaging silliness", because that's exactly what it is...

Shorts don't "sell short" just for the heck of it... They analyze a company, and if it looks like a "damaged" company for whatever reason, it may be worthy of shorting.. Not all companies only go up in price, for many different reasons...
Free money for 10 years has covered up a lot of sins, for many different companies, and Tesla is just another company in that regard..

If Elon tends to business, and doesn't spend half his day.....and half his night.....tweeting, he'd be much better off...
And so would his company...

Again, GeoMetro, you have it exactly right...
Thank you..

 

[Unpilot]

If Elon were to tweet out "I am taking a two+ month break from Twitter" the stock price would probably go above $300 on monday.

Twitter is nothing more than the world's sugarposting platfrom anyway. It sucks.

I could not agree more....the net benefit of twitter is way way on the negative side. To a certain degree it gave us the insulter in chief.

 

[mongo]

Shorts don't "sell short" just for the heck of it... They analyze a company, and if it looks like a "damaged" company for whatever reason, it may be worthy of shorting.. Not all companies only go up in price, for many different reasons...

Short positions carried over from Solar City when it merged with Tesla. Thus giving a reason to want Tesla to fail.

 

[CuriousSunbird]

Someone is playing games with the NASDAQ numbers it would appear. The 13F filed in August for Q2 showed Fidelity sold shares to reduce themselves into third place. It was widely reported that Baillie Gifford had become the largest shareholder for Tesla after Elon himself.

Major Tesla owner Fidelity trimmed stake last quarter: SEC filing | Reuters

There was an a 13F amendment filed 9/07 which appears to add 9m+ shares to those shown in the August filing. However, because of the similarity of the holding amount numbers (according to the form the relevant FMR units added 9,872,686 shares to their original 9,873,586) added and the fact that the same FMR units are involved, I suspect this is an error and the form should have been filed as a restatement rather than as an addition.

 

[oneday]

Cars sold per service center is an absolutely worthless metric. What is more important is the number of annual unit sales and the amount of profit made per vehicle sold.

And, the local MB dealership I used to use averages 400+ new car sales per month, or roughly 5,000 per year. Multiply that times the number of MB dealerships, and then realize that they make money on each car sold.

If profit was the only metric to value companies, no company could ever grow, there would be no new startups, etc. The world isn’t so simple and using metrics like sales per square foot, sales per service center etc are all useful.

 

[Barklikeadog]

If today wasn't the absolute bottom I'll eat my... Shorts

see ya next friday

 

[Boomer19]

How about doubling down on Vern Unsworth? Was it purposeful or childish? If he beleived what he said, he should have sent lawyers after him w/o warning to collect proof before it's hidden.

yeah, prob not the best idea.
im not advocating or necessarily agreeing with his methods.
trying to imagine seeing it through his eyes.
but i don’t think he’s being knee-jerk or uncalculated, is my point.

 

[Boomer19]

If I could reliably predict that, I would by now be so wealthy that I would have lost all interest in trading...

i’m sure @tivoboy and others have charts with some expectations