TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[MXWing]

It is free press right to publish. If it is not a national security issue, you can publish. Democracy would not work, if anyone could veto press from publishing their private stuff.

The point ran past you like a 2020 Roadster..
I’m gonna have to teach you about the birds and the bees and lots of other life lessons but we will start with the following:

Freedom of the press is to protect you from the government, not a license to say whatever, whenever without repercussion from non governmental entities.

Ask Roseanne how freedom of expression is working out for her.

Tesla can’t veto any of Electreks articles but they sure can decide whom is a friend to them and who is not.

Tesla and Electrek is are x and y variables that can be swapped with any company or news outlet.

Understand?

 

[Artful Dodger]

What would stop a lot of nonsense would be for Tesla to put a "How many cars be produced today" page on the website. I'd love that. I don't wee what there's be to lose really, after all we learn the figure end of the quarter anyway, would just stop all this ridiculous speculation in the meantime.

Given the press coverage for the cardboard fire at Fremont last week, do you think any information given to shorts will not be spun for its maximum negative impact?

 

[Boomer19]

I’m looking at the daily.
It’s a sell at the open at the highs and that is where the highest volume is. Then once well below vwap at the lows there is only modest buying and again a slight increase in volume of sales as we creep back up. On a daily you’re getting lower highs

It’s definitely a consolidation pattern over several days but my bet is that it gets resolved lower. I’d sell it all at 320$ if I didn’t have the calls sold across the posit. Their price is now down 50% so I might buy them back for a 50% gain and close the position and start to rebuy it under 295$

so we are agreeing the break is looking down on this consolidation...

you think it legs down more than $20?

not taking it as advice, don’t worry.

where has all the volume gone? something has to give at some point.

 

[Joe F]

Slow week, 3 day weekend on tap. Big boys away playing with their big boy toys.

Speaking of things being gone, does anyone know where the market action thread has gone? Asking for a friend...

 

[jeewee3000]

What would stop a lot of nonsense would be for Tesla to put a "How many cars be produced today" page on the website. I'd love that. I don't wee what there's be to lose really, after all we learn the figure end of the quarter anyway, would just stop all this ridiculous speculation in the meantime.

This would be counterproductive, as any deviation from what the market expects would be spun in a negative way. Also it would require a PR employee to give daily updates and provide guidance/interpretation regarding the numbers given out.

It's just not necessary and would be a waste of resources. The only reason there is so much focus on production right now is because Tesla has yet to turn a profit sustainably. Once profit is a given (= let's say Tesla posts a profit the next four quarters), the market will have more faith and won't care about precise production numbers.

Staying public is fine, but there need to be boundaries. What happens in Tesla, stays in Tesla, at least until the end of a quarter at the ER conference call.

 

[jkirkwood001]

That’s strange because I could have sworn I’ve heard him say a number of times over the years that he was wrong about various things.

There was the being wrong about putting too much tech into the X all at once.
There was the being wrong about how much demand S would generate per year.
There was the being wrong in trusting the supplier that messed up the Gigafactory battery line.
There was the being wrong about automation on the Model 3 ramp.

I can go on if you need more examples.

Feel free to characterize Elon, but do try and be accurate. Maybe you just don’t know what the word humble means Oh, humble person who knows more than Elon Musk.

... and on the Q2 call, admitted he was wrong to brush off the analysts on the Q1 call...

 

[Xorbit]

so we are agreeing the break is looking down on this consolidation...

you think it legs down more than $20?

not taking it as advice, don’t worry.

where has all the volume gone? something has to give at some point.

Anyone's guess short-term. That said, I was expecting the backlash from the "staying private" announcement which drew criticism of Elon's handling of the whole thing to push the share price below $300. Instead we had a weak open and a rally during most of yesterday. Yesterday's low ($303.68) was also a higher low than the 20/08 low ($282.26). So, by no means negative. We seem to be range bound short-term and long-term, with a long sideways consolidation since June 2017. My best guess is that we only break out on good earnings numbers. Generally speaking though, the longer the consolidation lasts, the bigger the move when price breaks out.

 

[Fact Checking]

I’m looking at the daily.
It’s a sell at the open at the highs and that is where the highest volume is. Then once well below vwap at the lows there is only modest buying and again a slight increase in volume of sales as we creep back up. On a daily you’re getting lower highs

It’s definitely a consolidation pattern over several days but my bet is that it gets resolved lower. I’d sell it all at 320$ if I didn’t have the calls sold across the posit. Their price is now down 50% so I might buy them back for a 50% gain and close the position and start to rebuy it under 295$

I see the pattern in the daily, and I agree with your technical analysis, but I disagree with the conclusion that it is going to break lower, due to the following curious properties of recent price action:

• Yesterday was "bad news day", the going-private deal is off and there is peak FUD "Stock Bashing" of Tesla on almost every form of media.
• Pre market dropped to $303 and everything was in place for a drop below $300.
• Yet yesterday TSLA was able to shake off that selling presssure and recovered from below $310 to almost $320 on high volume.
• As per technical analysis yesterday should have seen a leg down to $290 already, because the holding pattern was in place yesterday already.

My speculation: the reason for why technical analysis fails here are the Tesla fundamentals, which are strong, and which attracted at least one big buyer.

The buyer is patient and uses the extra liquidity provided by the FUD, by technical patterns and by the shorts who according to Ihor started shorting again.

I.e. there's at least one "big accumulator of TSLA shares" present on the market - and the not-going-private decision did not stop the buyer's accumulation of TSLA shares.

(I could easily be totally wrong about this though, and in a minute the price could drop below $300, so not advice.)

 

[scaesare]

Pretty much all electronics manufacturer with scale would have custom part number that isn’t sourceable in open market.

Tesla volume is drop in a bucket.

24 parts for the rear inverter. Say another 18 for the front. That's 42(!) total for an AWD car.

Assuming 250K cars a year at 1/2 for each flavor that's (125,000 * 24) + (125,000 * 42) = 8.25 million parts

At 500K cars a year that's 16.5 million.

Drop in the bucket?

 

[lklundin]

I believe all of this. Tesla's code is quite obviously a complete mess.

What surprised me is that Superchargers can have their firmware remotely updated (!!!)

From personal experience, I find the mentioned anecdotes totally plausible for the software industry in general.

Regarding Tesla, I have to say that their willingness to participate in DEF CON where they basically allowed strangers to look for software exploits in the Model S, and the results of this indicates that Tesla's software quality has gone up since that ex-employee's anecdotes (which could be exaggerated).

 

[sub]

Actually no. As part of ISO26262 requirement,digital cluster and its software and HW system is required to be ASIL D.

Hmm, should I believe the random internet nobody or Elon/Tesla on this? I’m sure Tesla put no thought nor did any research ahead of time. Your welcome to provide your real name so we can verify who you may be and what you may know? Yeah, didn’t think so.

 

[omarsultan]

From personal experience, I find the mentioned anecdotes totally plausible for the software industry in general.

Regarding Tesla, I have to say that their willingness to participate in DEF CON where they basically allowed strangers to look for software exploits in the Model S, and the results of this indicates that Tesla's software quality has gone up since that ex-employee's anecdotes (which could be exaggerated).

Agreed. Software is intrinsically a sausage-making exercise--any project of meaningful size is going to have stories like this.

 

[Remus]

Perhaps it’s not only the spotlight, may be its Elon Ego. Over promise and under deliver.

I would be really interested to see when Tesla offers true autonomy on the 2.0 hardware. Because anyone who work in this field would tell you that the amount of compute bandwidth, lack of redundancy in sensor suite. There is no way that the 2.0 hardware will work. So how much Tesla will need to spent to correct that will be interesting to watch.

The difference between Jobs and Musk. It one will listen (but not give you credit). One that won’t listen and bullish went his way. I liked Elon ambition and aggressiveness. Tesla wouldn’t be where it is today without him. But to take Tesla to next level, Musk doesn’t have the humility to do that. Everywhere Tesla can cut corner, they did. Take the model 3 screen for example. Using an industrial LG panel vs a true automotive grade (ASIL requirement for reliability).

I wish Tesla well. But will never buy one simply I know better.

I think, and some of the bulls here agree with me, that current stock price does not have full autonomy priced in.

Over promise and under deliver. I am among the few bulls that agree with you on this. Elon gave rosy predictions and some of them fell short. What they achieved is already much better than competitors, but those rosy predictions give others weapon to go against him.

But let's put things in perspective, shall we? Jobs original iPhone presentation was mostly fake. Some of the things he said on stage was never realized, like they already have OS X that ready to be used on the phone. OS X offers app developers true multi-thread parallel programming on the device, with ability to access the file system, can show multiple windows on the screen at the same time. Parallel threads in the apps was not there in the first iphone, split screen capability came much much later, and till today there's no file system access. If iphone really runs OS X I can easily start an ssh tunnel in China and get around the fire wall, can't do that.

The entire self driving community has been over promising and under delivery for years.

 

[Intl Professor]

I got thinking. The cat has more furniture than I do. And toys. And also has a sitter for when I’m out of town. There’s probably something wrong with that but I can’t put my finger on it.

In your eighties you begin to get the idea you can't take it with you. Hope the sitter is "vetted out;" hate to find the feline is learning new tricks while you are away. Do you have one of those baby monitors? I know, OT and too personal.

 

[lklundin]

Also let's not forget this Dan Neil (Wall Street Journal) interview:

Behind The Wheel of the Tesla Model 3 Performance Vehicle

"This is a fantastic car really way ahead of its time, but how long before other car makers catch up? My estimate, just driving this car, I think Tesla has at least a 5-year head start on the propulsion side: that is the batteries and the high power and high efficiency electric motors, and most of all, the software and packaging of their power electronics.

On those scores [Tesla] really does have a competitive advantage that will last for the next 5 years, I think."
​

Powerful vote of confidence from Dan Neil, who got a Pulitzer for his auto reviews.

Also, let's not forget that for this, the shorts (e.g. Mark BS and Larry Fossi aka Montana Skeptic) harassed him so badly on Twitter that he deleted his account there.

 

[defc0n]

From personal experience, I find the mentioned anecdotes totally plausible for the software industry in general.

Regarding Tesla, I have to say that their willingness to participate in DEF CON where they basically allowed strangers to look for software exploits in the Model S, and the results of this indicates that Tesla's software quality has gone up since that ex-employee's anecdotes (which could be exaggerated).

Someone ring?

 

[Zhelko Dimic]

Because you didn’t work for him.

Like I said the decision he made internally and sacrifice he decided. Isn’t kosher.

Good or bad. It doesn’t really matter to me.

Because everyone warned him and he just never listens. That is the difference between Steve and Elon. Like I said. SV is a small fraternity . Everyone knows everyone .

I can believe it's hard to get through to convince Elon.
But I think it's part of his psyche and being able to achieve 'impossible' so many times. He doesn't give much weight to careful, risk-awerse opinions. Sometimes he's wrong.

I actually believe you here 100%, yet it doesn't affect my decision to stick with Elon/Tesla, I think it's a price than Elon (and us) have to pay for him being able to do so many other things that no one ever believed were possible. I don't think we can and should try to help 'tuning' that balance in his head of how much to listen to other people and what is level of risk (impossibility?) that will stop him from trying to work though it.

There was a time when I was annoyed and critical at this lack of humility, but I've made my piece with it now. Elon is a package, there is no separating things we like from the ones we don't, especially that they're the same sometimes. I would not work for him though, in my (very) late 40s. But I'd let my kids go and work for him...

 

[shlokavica22]

Elon Musk on Twitter

What a surprise that is.


Edit: "For the record, my voice cracked once during the NY Times article. That’s it. There were no tears."

 

[HG Wells]

Boss Short:
Sorry I forgot to run this one when they had that cardboard fire.
Do you think we can still run it or should I hold it till the next trashcan fire ?

Editor
Shortsville Times

Headline: Shortsville Times

Has Tesla restarted production since fire ?

 

[Matias]

The point ran past you like a 2020 Roadster..
I’m gonna have to teach you about the birds and the bees and lots of other life lessons but we will start with the following:

Freedom of the press is to protect you from the government, not a license to say whatever, whenever without repercussion from non governmental entities.

Ask Roseanne how freedom of expression is working out for her.

Tesla can’t veto any of Electreks articles but they sure can decide whom is a friend to them and who is not.

Tesla and Electrek is are x and y variables that can be swapped with any company or news outlet.

Understand?

@RobStark said this much better than me in this post TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable