TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[EVNow]

Elon is not a quiter, he is a fighter and your can't fight unless you are in the room. Taking your ball and going home only works in 3rd grade.

So, what happened ? Oh, Elon had zero influence on Trump who withdrew from Paris Accord and Elon quit the Policy forum. And so did a lot of others.

Ofcourse Trump couldn't take the humiliation and announced that he had disbanded the forum, so they didn't really quit. How is that for 3rd grade ?

You can't reason with someone who thinks Climate Change is a hoax created by China. Sometimes its much better to fight from outside and win elections to effect change.

 

[EVNow]

Elon offended all the media who get paid by advertising dollars.

Really - how come they were positive about Elon until he refused to quit the policy forum after Trump's EO banning refugees ?

Conspiracy theories only go so far.

BTW, you should really read comments from those days on twitter (end of Jan '17) - people who liked Elon suddenly turned hostile.

 

[hacer]

Much shorting occurs via non-FINRA monitored institutions. Yes MMs have special exemptions which allow them to sell naked shorts. The SEC needs to get a grip on this obvious, blantant, and widespread abuse of trust. MMs are effectively issuing shares of TSLA thereby seriously diluting the SP, all without an actual Investor who owned shares.
...

Curiously TSLA doesn't appear at all for the entire month of November data in the SEC's failure to deliver reports SEC.gov | Fails-to-Deliver Data

Theoretically it means that there are, and have been no failures to deliver TSLA stock in November (and all previous failures were resolved). It would be very surprising if true because in all previous months there are many days with failures and usuallyoften large spikes of them on the settlement dates following options expirations. The spikes after options expirations are somewhat understandable because put holder who's options expire in the money get an automatic exercise and if they were held by short selling speculators they wouldn't own the underlying stock to sell and it might take a day or so for the broker to borrow the shares in some cases (most brokers convert a put exercise into a short position if you don't own the underlying stock).

So it's really weird that suddenly there's no failures to deliver for 30 straight days, especially since there was a decent dip on Nov 23 where many put options did expire in the money. I'm guessing something is actually wrong with the reporting.

 

[wipster]

OT but quite enjoyable video.

My friend's Dad started making little working copies of engines using not much more than a lathe and ingenuity when he retired. Enjoy!

 

[JollyRoger]

Since anything about $360 per share should mean tesla don't have to raise any more cash to pay off the 900million due on March, is this a good or bad thing?

Would another round of financing was a little stability to the stock or would the need for no further outside finance help to stabilise the stock?

Thoughts apreciated...

 

[tsunamiofhurt]

I’m at the Paramus NJ Tesla showroom. They have maybe 60+ Model 3 available for sale, and that’s just one of their lots

Available for sale or being sold?

 

[Fact Checking]

I’m at the Paramus NJ Tesla showroom. They have maybe 60+ Model 3 available for sale, and that’s just one of their lots

So if this apparent excess Model 3 inventory is nationwide and translates into lower delivery numbers for Q4 than Q3, as predicted by @Troy, and if 'vehicles in transit' will be higher than 8k in Q4 and production drops over Q3 well then I'd expect this to be FUD-ed non-stop until the Q4 financials are released - i.e. all of January.

As a reminder, Model 3 production in Q3 was 53,239 units, deliveries were 55,840 units. Lower numbers than these will be seen as a 'miss'.

One thing to keep in mind is that New Jersey is one of the slowest-to-deliver states: on average it takes 22 days from VIN to delivery. NJ is at the end of a long logistics chain: in 25 you could get a container from the west coast to China already (!).

West coast is 5-6 days and even Texas and Florida is now pretty good with 12 days. So if Tesla slightly mis-judged how well they can deliver by the end of quarter in New Jersey then there's probably little they can do about it with just 2 days left from the quarter and the cars would be sitting in the lot. In the other, faster to deliver states they'd probably be distributed towards places that are ahead in deliveries.

 

[Buckminster]

Check out the Model 3 general assembly video.

Pretty amazing in its simplicity

Model 3 | Tesla

Yup, the amount of time spent inside the body by humans is minimal. A few people early on with seats on an articulated arm doing the wiring and the rest is just a blink of the eye. This makes me very happy. It's difficult to see what more could have been automated fairly easily with this design.

 

[Artful Dodger]

Since anything about $360 per share should mean tesla don't have to raise any more cash to pay off the 900million due on March, is this a good or bad thing?

Would another round of financing was a little stability to the stock or would the need for no further outside finance help to stabilise the stock?

Thoughts apreciated...

The Underwriter of the Tesla convertible bond purchased Options on TSLA stock as a hedge against the settlement price being above $360.

Tesla is off the hook until the SP heads way over $530 or so I think (by memory; don't quote me).

If that happens, there will be more of us grinning than frowning, at least around here.

Cheers!

 

[tsunamiofhurt]

@BioSehnsucht, see my message here. Looking at the data, I can differentiate between day offs and full work days and sometimes half work days too but I don't know the details about how they are arranging shifts. Also, I don't have precise production numbers for each day. I only have a rough idea about how a day compares to other days or a week to another week.

No, you cannot. That is a colossal leap of logic to use a tiny sample of reported VINs to infer what's happening at the factory.

 

[Fact Checking]

No, you cannot. That is a colossal leap of logic to use a tiny sample of reported VINs to infer what's happening at the factory.

Well, in Q4 924 VINs were reported - that's about 10 VINs per day and 70 VINs per week.

To me that feels like a large enough sample rate @Troy could use to try to extrapolate factory production from - but it's indeed a somewhat noisy, under-sampled source of data.

 

[KarenRei]

Frequent battery replacement?

Seriously, In the context of charging power, Porsche's constant mentioning of their 700 V voltage has relevance only for the thickness of the charging cable.

The fundamental issue is that for the given battery size, tripling the charging power (relative to Tesla's current Supercharger), triples the C-rate which is detrimental to the long-term health of each cell.

So maybe Porsche is betting that owners of the Taycan will not mind the more frequent replacements (or upgrades) of the battery pack...

That's one of quite a few possibilities. First, two earlier possibilities that has since been ruled out:

* High power-density cells: Porsche has made it clear that they're using high energy-density cells (if I remember right, it was something like 260Wh/kg).

* They only plan to allow 350kW very briefly (contradicted by their overall charge time announcements)

* The vehicle is super-inefficient, and thus it achieves its range with via a gigantic battery pack (this does not appear to be the case)

Now for the others (may be a combination of several):

* Porsche has access to some unique cell variety beyond the state of the art that everyone else in the industry has access to, or some charging "trick" that nobody else has figured out (exceedingly unlikely)

* Porsche is deliberately frying cells with a high C rate (accepting the cost to replace packs on warranty from those who do 350kW charging often, counting on such people to be in the minority and having a large enough vehicle profit margin to eat the cost)

* The actual pack capacity is much higher than the usable capacity, so what looks like a high C rate is actually a more moderate C rate from the cells' perspective (that is, large chunks of the pack locked off on the bottom and especially the top). This will also make the wear on the cells less (charging near the centre of a cell's range causes less degradation than near the extremes).

* 350kW will be available in a variant that comes out "in the future" (such as the "Cayenne Turbo" to go with their "Turbocharging Network"), with the intent to take advantage of several years more of cell tech advancement.

* 350kW will be only available in variants that use a double-thickness / super-long-range pack, akin to the Roadster (Porsche has not announced plans to make such a version, but since we know little about the differences between the Cayenne variants, it's a possibility)

If I had to guess, it's a mix of "burning out cells with a high C-rate", "significantly higher real capacity than usable", and possibly "350kW only in future variants" (either for chemistry improvements or super-long-range packs).

 

[tsunamiofhurt]

Well, in Q4 924 VINs were reported - that's about 10 VINs per day and 70 VINs per week.

To me that feels like a large enough sample rate @Troy could use to try to extrapolate factory production from - but it's indeed a somewhat noisy, under-sampled source of data.

1) The error bars around 10 (biased) VINs per day are huge.
2) Who's to say VINs are assigned as soon as they are produced? Or that people submit them with the exact date? Or that there isn't a delay between when the reporter receives the information and when it actually rolled off the line?
3) I've taken multiple trips to the factory during purported "half shifts" or "no AWD production" and found the complete opposite.

All of this to say it's a good data point, but cannot be used with this kind of specificity or confidence.

 

[JRP3]

Really - how come they were positive about Elon until he refused to quit the policy forum after Trump's EO banning refugees ?

Many were negative before that. Go all the way back to the NYT Broder fiasco for example, even earlier to the Roadster days.

Conspiracy theories only go so far.

Indeed. Media negativity didn't start when Elon quit the policy forum.

BTW, you should really read comments from those days on twitter (end of Jan '17) - people who liked Elon suddenly turned hostile.

People have found different reasons to turn hostile all along, just as some have turned favorable. Certain people seem to love being outraged.

 

[Hock1]

Curiously TSLA doesn't appear at all for the entire month of November data in the SEC's failure to deliver reports SEC.gov | Fails-to-Deliver Data

Theoretically it means that there are, and have been no failures to deliver TSLA stock in November (and all previous failures were resolved). It would be very surprising if true because in all previous months there are many days with failures and usuallyoften large spikes of them on the settlement dates following options expirations. The spikes after options expirations are somewhat understandable because put holder who's options expire in the money get an automatic exercise and if they were held by short selling speculators they wouldn't own the underlying stock to sell and it might take a day or so for the broker to borrow the shares in some cases (most brokers convert a put exercise into a short position if you don't own the underlying stock).

So it's really weird that suddenly there's no failures to deliver for 30 straight days, especially since there was a decent dip on Nov 23 where many put options did expire in the money. I'm guessing something is actually wrong with the reporting.

Good guess! IMO, there is definitely something wrong with the reporting. There is no way the stock price could be so controlled without shorted stock that has not been delivered. I believe the system is filled with naked shorts.

I've been thinking about ways to shine the light on this criminality. Since nobody (i.e., SEC, FINRA, DTCC) is checking to make sure there aren't more shares (of any stock) in the system than the sum of authorized and issued shares plus shares that have been legitimately shorted, this "imbalance" (created by naked shorts) can exist without consequence unless some event forces it to be corrected. IMO, (other than the company being bought out), there are two ways that the criminally created and sold shares can be outed.

1) The company spins off part of the company to shareholders by issuing x number of shares in the new company for each of the 172.6M shares of Tesla that are outstanding. Those who have essentially created and sold unauthorized shares to unsuspecting investors will have a problem: everyone who owns Tesla stock will expect to receive these shares in the spun-off company. The naked shorts cannot produce these newly created shares and would have to even-up the imbalance of FTDs in the system.

2) The company issues rights to existing shareholders to purchase Tesla stock at a fixed price for a fixed amount of time. Say, for every 10 shares of TSLA, each shareholder has the right to buy 1 additional share. Again, the naked shorts cannot produce a security that is not trading in the marketplace and would have to correct the FTD situation.

This is all hypothetical but I'm interested in all considered opinions.

 

[JRP3]

Not doing this is being pointlessly mean to customers.

That's a bit far don't you think? My guess is they have more demand than they can handle for cars without a hitch.

 

[tsunamiofhurt]

I am confused that Tesla recently reported 1000 cars in one day yet the Bloomberg tracker is stuck in the low 4000s.

... when did Tesla report 1k cars in one day? Also, Bloomberg tracker != production.

Is there any rule/regulation which can forbid Tesla to give Q4 financials guidence in the Q4 delivery report on Jan 2? It could come as a surprise. I see almost zero possibility Tesla is not profitable for Q4. If it's a big profit, I hope they give the guidence on Jan 2.

It's not guidance if the quarter is over. It's like saying we think we were profitable, but we need another couple months to actually calculate the numbers and have them audited. Obviously, the consequences of being wrong on their estimate are huge.

If you look at the dates of the previous shareholder letters for Q4, they aren't even posted until February of the following year. I guess they could try to bump it up a little in early February, but that still probably isn't even January.

I haven't followed the financials that closely in previous years so I would defer to any better info from others...

I highly doubt it. Remember, this is an annual filing that needs to have audited financials. It takes longer than a Q so I wouldn't expect anything until *at least* mid/late Feb.

 

[hacer]

Republicans, like all politicians, simply follow the money.

"The five states that get the largest percentage of their power from wind turbines — Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and North Dakota — all voted for Mr. Trump. So did Texas, which produces the most wind power in absolute terms. In fact, 69 percent of the wind power produced in the country comes from states that Mr. Trump carried in November."

That's just because those states have the most wind; it has nothing to do with ideology in the states

 

[Johnny Ma]

That's just because those states have the most wind; it has nothing to do with ideology in the states

Yes, and the assertion I was trying to dispel was that Republicans would never support anything good for the environment. I didn't say they're doing it because they care, I said they're doing it for money. You can expect this trend to continue and at some point a majority of Republicans will be very pro-green energy, if only for the money.

 

[JRP3]

Not making a hitch option is pointlessly mean to customers.

Mean suggests intent, where there is none. You're really being excessively emotional about this. I could say it's really mean for Tesla not to build the $35K car for those of us who want it before the tax credit is gone. That's a greater impact than not getting a tow hitch.