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

[henchman24]

Proof is where?

I say high volume in first hour of day, after a w/e is sign of retail being manipulated. No proof, just experience. Retail sat at home, saw the news, scanned charts for five minutes, focused on the past. They see it is safe, place orders, orders get to be known, pre market draws them in more, open at or near the high, then the orders get exhausted and stock can contract.

Gamma squeeze I find hard to understand, but not deep into options. It seems to get thrown about after the fact, and at peak mention, rug gets pulled.

History of how gamma squeezes have happened over the years.

I was mentioning this being a potential gamma squeeze last week and months ago that when recovery happened (which I thought would be sooner) that a gamma squeeze would happen.

 

[MABMAB]

Just a FYI here... a high volume jump in the first hour of a day after options expiration is consistent with a gamma squeeze. And there is usually a pause over the rest of the day and the following day before pressure starts applying again. If we are in the midst of a squeeze like that, this is normal volume and pricing action. Things would likely resume sometime in the middle of Wednesday.

AMC
May giant price moves, Monday pop continued all week starting 5/24, only closed lower than the open that Friday.
Following week giant moves Monday and Tuesday continued.

My point is, this is not a RAGING bull market and folks get way too excited from recovering a bit of ground in tsla

 

[henchman24]

AMC
May giant price moves, Monday pop continued all week starting 5/24, only closed lower than the open that Friday.

AMC is not the only gamma squeeze to ever happen....

Also Tesla hasn't closed lower yet... we're barely into the day...

 

[TheTalkingMule]

Some squeezing/covering followed by a normal MMD. Interesting to see if we're stabilize above $950 by the time of the meeting.

Would be a nice foundation for a move north on split approval and any announcements.

 

[bkp_duke]

We'll then by all means please post a link to the article!

Why do we do this? Just say there's FUD and paste the headline text. We don't need to do their job for them.

Because you can't fight this stuff unless you are aware of exactly what they are saying.

You would not believe how many times each week people "test" me to see about "oh, did you hear about XXXXX with Tesla? Looks like they are going downhill!". Knowing the details allows us to pick apart the argument in a heartbeat and unmask the trolls.

 

[growler23]

Did you catch this fact? Just 4 Gallons equivalent battery capacity! This is not a truck, it is a Home Depot utility vehicle for local construction folks at best.

"With the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck has less energy onboard than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank."

If you think that's strange, the PHEV battery part holds the equivalent energy of about 4 tablespoons of gas (maybe it was 4 teaspoons).

Spoiler: Gas?

I used to pour that much into my old buick carb just to get it started after the float dried up. It would run for about 5 sec until the lines were finally primed. (It had a 401 nailhead engine, I knew them well along with the Dynaflow trany... what a useless skill. Here's a fun fact. It took about 35 yrs to figure out that you don't fill the radiator all the way to the top. I "overheated" a million times, and there was really no problem, ever. This was pure tribal knowledge, and written nowhere and I read all the factory manuals on that vehicle top to bottom. When I sold it back to the original owner, his mechanic knew right away about this little known fact. You have no idea how many radiators/caps, thermostats, head gaskets... I'm still mad a GM for this omission of fact.)

And I believe my Model Y has about 2.2 gallons of gas - equivalent energy in it. As has been said before, we achieve the incredible range we do with these cars by a combination of the great electric motor efficiency and very low coefficient of drag.
Towing something (even putting on racks according to some here) eliminates that second advantage, leaving EVs with poor towing (or rack!) range.
I expect that in the short term, this will be a major knock against Cybertruck and the Lightning. CT may have more batteries, will have better motors than the Lightning, but it surely still won't achieve gasaholic range. If it does I will mortgage everything and go all in on TSLA, because wow.
In the medium term, I expect a proliferation of the smart battery electric motor-containing trailers (I think Thule showed an early one) that go _underneath_ what you are trying to tow (say a boat), and assist with their own towing. They will be expensive and require their own charging. Probably their own software updates as well. But they will also bring advantages like the sway stabilizing the Airstream electric trailer mentioned, presumably smart braking and safety enhancements as well depending on price.
In the long term, batteries may finally make up the difference as (power + energy) / (weight + cost) ratio continues to improve, either incrementally or with the Solid State breakthrough (that will magically save Toyota and GM as they claim /s). I have seen a number of pro predictors (fwiw) that believe there is a lot of headroom to improve batteries still. They don't believe we are near fundamental physics limits yet; only the limits of known workable chemistries and even those are not fully plumbed out to mass production cost efficiencies yet..

 

[MABMAB]

History of how gamma squeezes have happened over the years.

I was mentioning this being a potential gamma squeeze last week and months ago that when recovery happened (which I thought would be sooner) that a gamma squeeze would happen.

It did not happen in GME, same week as AMC.

So, example sample of two counter to which you say.

 

[wws]

That may work if the electric drivetrain was not gimped in these hybrids, but as they are, I'm afraid the owners will not see the performance benefits of having an electric car and will only view it as something they use for economy.

Case in point - you can see that the prime in EV-only mode does 0-60 in 9.5 seconds, while in combined mode it does it in 5.7. This is precisely what a lot of people are talking about when they say that the PHEVs are the worst of both worlds; crappy range, crappy acceleration, more failure points, etc.

Too general a statement. Some PHEVs perform better in EV mode than in hybrid mode. I can once again point to the Volt - where you have full performance when running as an EV. However for example the gen 1 Volt, when running in one of the "charge sustaining" (e.g., hybrid) modes with a depleted battery pack, could go into a "propulsion power reduced" state when climbing steep grades. Hence the need for "Mountain mode" which maintains a higher than minimal SoC in the battery pack so that there is plenty of electric power as needed. The BMW i3 REx has similar/worse problems. In that case the ICE in the REx is nowhere near as capable, nor as integrated, as the ICE in the Volt. The REx is essentially a backup generator.

Won't argue on the number of additional failure points.

PHEVs were a great interim solution 10-12 years ago when Li-ion battery prices were > 10x what they are today. But there is a reason GM, Ford, and others are dropping them in favor of full BEVs. I'm not sure how this proposed bill will really help Toyota.

 

[Usain]

Say Questions are open for the Annual Meeting: Say

I'm aghast. Most of the questions are remarkably stupid. They seem to fall into 4 equally-weighted categories:

1. Questions recently answered elsewhere.
2. Questions they definitely won't answer at all.
3. Questions that are just too stupid to acknowledge.
4. Questions that are genuinely helpful.

Here's to hoping that only the last kind get up-voted.

 

[willow_hiller]

I'm aghast. Most of the questions are remarkably stupid.

The odd thing is these questions appear on the platform so quickly, they must be automated. But for the life of me I cannot imagine why someone would build a bot to automatically ask questions like:

• Is Tesla working in Hydrogen powered vehicle?
• Does Telsa plan on making a hybrid car ?
• Is there a split coming?

 

[MABMAB]

I'm aghast. Most of the questions are remarkably stupid. They seem to fall into 4 equally-weighted categories:

1. Questions recently answered elsewhere.
2. Questions they definitely won't answer at all.
3. Questions that are just too stupid to acknowledge.
4. Questions that are genuinely helpful.

Here's to hoping that only the last kind get up-voted.

I don't know, Musk can get really trippy answering dopey questions like on DOJO. I recall one CC it seems like 1/4 of the call was on that.

Any questions should be weighted by share size held, which ticks me off cause they still have not verified our holdings.

 

[MABMAB]

My questions:

When will new CEO performance aware stuff next be announced?
Master Plan 3 timing?
I'd want a broad brush strokes painting of where they are aiming for 5 and 10 years down the road.

 

[MartinAustin]

Did you catch this fact? Just 4 Gallons equivalent battery capacity! This is not a truck, it is a Home Depot utility vehicle for local construction folks at best.

"With the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck has less energy onboard than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank."

If you think that's strange, the PHEV battery part holds the equivalent energy of about 4 tablespoons of gas (maybe it was 4 teaspoons).

This is not new news whatsoever. Expressing the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline in its standard physics units of ~33.5kWh simply goes to show how inefficient internal combustion is. My OG P85 contains the same energy as about 2.5 U.S. gallons of gasoline. But it still gets EPA 265 miles of range. If a F150 with a 25-gallon tank had the same efficiency, it would have an EPA range of 2,650 miles!!!

When this simple statement of physics reaches more people, they'll realise how bad ICE has been all these years.

Edit: I see @growler23 said basically the same thing already

 

[StealthP3D]

Just a FYI here... a high volume jump in the first hour of a day after options expiration is consistent with a gamma squeeze. And there is usually a pause over the rest of the day and the following day before pressure starts applying again. If we are in the midst of a squeeze like that, this is normal volume and pricing action. Things would likely resume sometime in the middle of Wednesday.

I have no doubt we are in a squeeze right now, the only question is how dramatic it will get. And that is completely unknowable without data we don't (and won't) have access to. Only the market makers can estimate how many synthetic shares the various players have flooded the market with. Presumably, they have accounted for the TSLA stock split and have a plan to get the authentic shares they need but we have no way of knowing if they are more competent this time around or not. I would call it a "short-squeeze" except I believe the "short" numbers we have do not account for all the synthetic shares market makers have minted this year. It's more of a "corrupt market manipulators" squeeze that the upcoming split has forced upon them.

What I would like to see is for the price gains of the split induced "short-squeeze" to blend smoothly into the Q3 and Q4 realization that TSLA is an incredible money printing machine and most of the rest are hopelessly incompetent. This will put the share price on a more sustainable and favorable trajectory than a split alone could ever hope to accomplish.

Of course, it will never be a smooth rise, I am speaking from more of a "big picture" view. TSLA was a screaming buy in the $600's and the rest of this year will make that painfully apparent to those who, for whatever reason, could not see that simple truth.

 

[woodisgood]

The odd thing is these questions appear on the platform so quickly, they must be automated. But for the life of me I cannot imagine why someone would build a bot to automatically ask questions like:

• Is Tesla working in Hydrogen powered vehicle?
• Does Telsa plan on making a hybrid car ?
• Is there a split coming?

To introduce certain concepts into mainstream consciousness by drubbing your head with them over and over in various online discourse (like, "See? Lots of people are thinking about hydrogen powered vehicles!" whereas in fact almost nobody is thinking about hydrogen powered vehicles.)

 

[TN Mtn Man]

For me, the "mission" question is "does each battery put in a hybrid reduce atmospheric GHG's as much as an equivalent amount of battery put in an EV RIGHT NOW?" I actually think that answer is a little tougher to come up with, particularly given that globally, the EV manufacturers cannot make enough EV's to meet demand. Does taking a small amount of battery materials and putting them into a 53 mpg Prius (my current Gas Guzzler when I'm not driving the Model Y) knock out more GHG's than the ~1/50th of an EV battery you could make with it? Depends on what the consumer would have bought otherwise - this is not simple since, again, no one (not even the 800-lb gorilla in the room, Tesla) has the factories to meet demand right now.
If some percentage of those battery materials end up in Priuses (straight hybrid for this discussion, not PHEV - added complexity to calculate), and those 53 mpg Priuses (which Toyota can make en masse) displace 15 mpg Toyota Tundras (yes this does occasionally happen), are we better off overall in the next 20 years than if those battery materials were sitting idle while Tesla builds more factories (remember, Elon says they are not cell constrained)? Particularly since those Prius batteries at end-of-life can still be downcycled to energy storage, or recycled into EV batteries once we have enough EV manufacturing worldwide?
Or does the absolutist stance that considers none of these things but just says "no more ICE build ever" hold?
I do not think I know the answer, but I do not think it is simple. But I agree that, in all these scenarios Tesla is still in the hedgehog catbird seat.

Hard to know exactly without knowing the battery material mix. Lets assume that the limit is based on power storage to keep things simple. Most PHEVs use fairly small battery packs, sub 15kWh. A MY is what, a 77wWh battery? So you can build 5 PHEVs with the same batteries you can build one MY with (using this simplistic analysis). And if you assume the average daily use of a car is <40 miles (seems like that was the claim back when the Volt was introduced), for the same battery capacity you reduce 5X the amount of ICE emissions that one BEV does (since that's within the EV range of common PHEVs). Now, when you factor in longer trips where the PHEV kicks in the ICE, that changes the balance-by how much we don't know. Depends on the specific usage.

 

[Big Time]

Wow David Einhorn takes a stake in twitter
What a bitter loser

 

[TheTalkingMule]

What I would like to see is for the price gains of the split induced "short-squeeze" to blend smoothly into the Q3 and Q4 realization that TSLA is an incredible money printing machine and most of the rest are hopelessly incompetent. This will put the share price on a more sustainable and favorable trajectory than a split alone could ever hope to accomplish.

Exactly. It's almost like Elon planned to flood the market with shares knowing hedgies and MM's would take the extra float and push SP down 50%. Then all these new employees come on board and instantly see a 100% appreciation of their options.

Tightening the float via share split looks to be doing wonders for clearing out the synthetic short shares, then the EPS deluge begins in earnest by mid October. Glorious.

MM's will be fine with it too, since they can now screw over all the CC and call spread sellers. They'll be gobbling up their shares for $850-1050 all the way to Christmas with SP at ATH. Must be nice.

 

[SarahsDad]

Now Elon's hair styles don't seem so crazy...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1553985248878379008

https://twitter.com/x/status/1554006801057808384

 

[Drezil]

Wow David Einhorn takes a stake in twitter
What a bitter loser

So... you mean we should leave the sinking ship of TWTR?