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

[S3XY]

*Valid until any roadwork cone gets moved 50m

LOL. Last night I used NoA on my way home and came upon some construction. There were cones and cement barriers all around and there were lane shifts. I saw a notification pop up on the screen saying "Construction zone detected". I left NoA on and was very attentive (hands on steering wheel, hovering brake pedal) while AP navigated the construction zone flawlessly. I have no doubt that Tesla will be first to autonomous driving.

 

[neroden]

You forgot a point...
- They drive one.

I am starting to see Model 3s everywhere in Ithaca. There already were quite a few, but I saw two white Model 3s I'd never seen before, and a red one, and a black one, and a blue one, in the course of two days (and I wasn't really driving that much).

 

[Jkaufm32]

LOL. Last night I used NoA on my way home and came upon some construction. There were cones and cement barriers all around and there were lane shifts. I saw a notification pop up on the screen saying "Construction zone detected". I left NoA on and was very attentive (hands on steering wheel, hovering brake pedal) while AP navigated the construction zone flawlessly. I have no doubt that Tesla will be first to autonomous driving.

Were you following another car or were you on the road alone?

 

[neroden]

D

Duffman says, temporary bounce. Just as the market went up from way oversold conditions, so too did TSLA. I don’t really see any fundamental change in the last three market days to the short term story. As others have pointed out, without necessarily being too much higher beta, TSLA is going to move faster in these types of wild swings.without a strong change to the story. Leaking info about possibly slightly higher sales than what may have been modeled doesn’t change it too much for me.

Now, it we really can get up over 215/220$ here with conviction and hold that - even when the overall market inevitably is going to move lower again, then that could be a change in consensus. I’m not going to chase this move though at this point.

I think short gots more than they EXPECTED and don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, and that led to a dis proportionate amount of buying. I have been too busy in the past five days to crunch the numbers and review short interest change but I think I know what I am going to find when I do.

My overall mkt feeling is we’ll have some lower market tests in the near term. I would expect TSLA to perform similarly to the last mkt down trend. Meaning, another over react to the downside.

Well, frankly I hope you're right and that this next big dip happens after my merger arb finishes and cashes out. I will not get that lucky. :-(

 

[Spacemanspliff]

‘Unwinding the wave’ is not happening like I expected. Instead of an extra ship in the last month of the quarter, it seems all ships for this quarter have already left San Francisco.The last ship heading towards EU left 3 days earlier than in Q1.
I wonder why in Q2 the first EU ship only departed the 17th of the first month? At a production rate of 1000/day, Tesla only needs 4 days of production to fill the first ship. Even if Tesla keeps producing USA cars untill 30/6, we should see a ship leave for Europe at the latest at the end of the first week of Q3, if not, not a lot of wave unwinding will happen.
BTW: The Benelux FB groups are currently flooded with pictures of proud people taking delivery of their Model 3.

I’m guessing the very few days of Q2, or the beginning of Q3.

The end of quarter delivery push is on, every car produced this month they will be trying hard to put in hands, tent sales, deals if your exact model can’t be matched, etc.

 

[neroden]

OT

It's also human nature. We don't like to be the outlier. Deep down people prefer to take the risk that they are wrong, but wrong along with the larger crowd, and than to be wrong and be the oddball out. If you fail with the crowd you can make excuses. If you fail on your own then it's only yourself you can blame.

I guesss that's majority human nature? But some of us are more "oppositional defiant" Rather be wrong on my own than right with the crowd, usually... so I gotta watch out for the cognitive errors which that leads to.

 

[ggr]

Our moderators owe us an explanation of why those posts are unacceptable.

The posts are perfectly acceptable in a thread of their own. But when posted in this thread, it turns into many posts of the form "Here in Podunk there are 3 within 20 miles", "now there are only two", "But in southern Arkansas there are 5", and people get irate, and the moderators (busy volunteers) can't keep up. Note that the Ferrari discussion (rightly) burned out quickly, and was basically over before any of us could get to it.

Now the moderators will yell at me for telling our secrets.

 

[shrspeedblade]

Well, had a little dry powder so tossed 3 more shares at $207 into the Roth IRA.

(When they go there, I'm bloody serious shorts, you won't be covering with those until ARK's sky high $4000! )

 

[BBone]

I am starting to see Model 3s everywhere in Ithaca. There already were quite a few, but I saw two white Model 3s I'd never seen before, and a red one, and a black one, and a blue one, in the course of two days (and I wasn't really driving that much).

It's the Cornell money! Or the bankers and consultants from NYC doing recruiting

 

[neroden]

OK, interesting theory.

Ferarri isn't going anywhere. Even in a world where 90% of car sales are EVs, there will still be niche ICE cars, like Ferarris for wealthy people who want to buy them. In fact, oil and its derivatives will likely last a lot longer now because electricity will be the primary means of powering new vehicles within the next 15 years. By the end of this century. Ferrari will likely still be selling million dollar cars, along with Bugatti and others.

Speaking of Volkswagen, this is the second or third comment I've seen about them going out of business on this forum (OK I know you said it was unlikely, but it was mentioned). This isn't GM or Chrysler or some other cowboy enterprise, it's a company with half a trillion Euros worth of assets, revenues north of EUR100bn and net income of around EUR12bn making 12 million cars a year. On which planet are they about to go bust?

The one where Penn Central went bankrupt? (Look it up.) And where GM went bankrupt?

BTW, I don't know if anyone here is an ex-VW owner, but they recently sent out emails about the $800m investment in their Tennessee plant purely for building EVs. These guys are very serious about breaking into this business and you'd be a braver man than me to bet against them.

I do believe this. As a result of Dieselgate, most of the VW execs went to German prisons. The only guy who *wasn't* in on the crime was Diess, because he was the EV promoter so the other execs never told him about the diesel emissions cheating. The result is that Diess, the EV promoter, is now running VW. And so he's very serious about it. But you have to remember, they only *started* after Diess became CEO -- they simply weren't doing a damn thing before that. So Tesla is more than 10 years ahead -- that's a lot to catch up with.

 

[neroden]

It's the Cornell money! Or the bankers and consultants from NYC doing recruiting

Maybe some of it, but they usually buy Model Xes (I've seen more of those around lately too).

So, if you don't know, there's a very major "green" attitude in this area. There were lots of Priuses, then lots of Volts and Leafs (there still are a lot), quite a lot of Bolts. Model 3 is more affordable than S or X, and more parctical than the other companies' electric cars, so I was expecting a ton of them to appear. However, until recently Tesla had no upstate NY service center, which deterred people. from buying Teslas.

The opening of the Rochester and Albany service centers is probably unleashing the floodgates of orders here, IMO.

 

[heltok]

What's Ethereum?

Edit: spelling. Still, legit question.

Ok, because Elon is getting spammed by this and has commented on this I will try to answer. Background, most of my TSLA holding was bought with money I made investing in Ethereum, I bought at the kickstarter IPO before the currency even existed for 1BTC=2000ETH or 1ETH=$0.3 and sold most at 1ETH=$900, today trading at 1ETH=$250 and I was reading about ethereum almost daily for a few years.

TLDR: It is like Bitcoin, but more programmable. Second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap with a crazy bull market from 2014-2017 (~3000x).

Longer version:
Ethereum is both a p2p digital currency and a unit(gas) that can be used to pay for transactions/operations on a decentralized turing complete state machine. The state machine is turing complete, ie anything can be done there, and decentralized ie it is hard to shut down and is not governed by a single entity but by consensus from the majority of the miners/stakers. Name any software/digital platform and it can probably be implemented there, maybe not as efficiently right now, but in theory at least. Ebay, a few lines of code. A casino already done. A chess program already done. Dropbox already done. Resource management for Tesla and its suppliers can be done. Become rich by selling virtual cats on the network. Anything you can imagine. And since it is open it will be easier for companies to interface and it will be possible to timestamp transactions to verify what happened when if there are disagreements. It is also open source and can be forked into multiple versions at any time and has been forked one major time(the fork is called Ethereum Classic). Since it is pretty easy to program, many other projects have chosen to either be hosted on ethereum or have their own cryptocurrency on the ethereum network as a token, often using the standard ERC20. For example 1DAI≈1USD is a decentralized stablecoin that is run entirely on the ethereum network.

The founder Vitalik Buterin is a popular nerd with cult status in the crypto space.

(Sorry for any spelling errors)

 

[neroden]

I bought at 184 and 196. Same average. You did fine. I just have a better “remember when..” story for the grandkids.

My average is now around $210 (after massively expanding my position size), but my best story is about the shares I bought at $30.

 

[winfield100]

OT
(sorta but why stock price ARK forecasts is appropriate in my time horizon)

What you said. I came to the same conclusion: the fossil fuel interests are using the economic importance of fossil fuels to control governments. We have to break the economic value of fossil fuels in order to remove their control over governments. Tesla is doing more to break the economic value of fossil fuels than anything else I could invest in, and on top of that, has somehow put itself in a market-leading or near-monopoly position in most of its markets. (Which is why it's a better investment than, say, solar panels.)

"..until the end of the nineteenth century, salt was one of the world's most strategic commodities. As the only means of meat preservation, it was fundamental to national economies. Salt mines conferred national power and wars were even fought over their control..."
turn Oil into salt, economically, (already happening all around the planet)

https://www.ncleg.gov/DocumentSites...uts/Korin -- Turning Oil into Salt 3-6-12.pdf

 

[neroden]

Powerwall info. A few friends of mine have finally been receiving Powerwalls in the last 4 weeks. I was just speaking to my installer/dealer, Swell Energy in Santa Monica, about my two Powerwalls which I ordered 14 months ago. He says within the last two months Powerwall deliveries from Tesla has increased dramatically and I should have mine within a few weeks.

Maybe they are sourcing batteries elsewhere or have increased Giga1 production?

Carsonight indicated that GF1 was seriously ramped up recently, so I'm betting it's increased Giga1 production. This feels like confirmation to me. Great news.

Energy could be the positive wild card on Q2 profits.

 

[TradingInvest]

I am starting to see Model 3s everywhere in Ithaca. There already were quite a few, but I saw two white Model 3s I'd never seen before, and a red one, and a black one, and a blue one, in the course of two days (and I wasn't really driving that much).

That's interesting to know. A few months ago I visited Palo Alto, I can see the whole town is switching to Tesla. Last week I went to Ithaca, in 4 days I didn't see one Tesla. I was thinking what's wrong with these people? I view this as future demand - all the gasoline car drivers on the road.

NYT has an article "The Car Industry Is Under Siege". I read through the comments, I think those comments reflect the public perception toward EV. FUD has really done it's job. No wonder everyday people buy 200,000 new gasoline vehicles while we already have this fantastic Model 3 available. They need a test drive and a good info session.

 

[neroden]

He also said this would be the year of solar.

And he also said this would be the year of service.

Service communicatoins is *hard*. But with the opening of the Rochester, NY service center, and Rejkjavik, and Toledo, and so on, I think this is starting to be the year of service.

 

[Ad Astra]

That's a meaningless statement. Obviously, the ones where anything goes wrong are the ones where the customer has to phone someone up. The test of whether Tesla's communications are improving are how they deal with these "unusual cases", not how the "easy cases" work.

I was not referring to Tesla's communication improvements so perhaps in that context, it is a meaningless statement. I made that statement to highlight the level of exposure a prospective owner would have to FUD on the path towards ownership. In any case, optimizing for automated order/delivery flow would free up employees to handle the unusual cases you speak of more effectively, don't you agree?

 

[neroden]

That's interesting to know. A few months ago I visited Palo Alto, I can see the whole town is switching to Tesla. Last week I went to Ithaca, in 4 days I didn't see one Tesla. I was thinking what's wrong with these people?

Probably you were out at the wrong time of day. For some reason our evening rush hour starts at 3:30 and is over by 5:30 (college hours, I think).

Possibly you were in the wrong part of town. I saw three different Teslas parked at the hospital. The others I saw on route 96B. You aren't actually going to see them around Cornell much, for parking reasons.

I view this as future demand - all the gasoline car drivers on the road.

Yep!

NYT has an article "The Car Industry Is Under Siege". I read through the comments, I think those comments reflect the public perception toward EV. FUD has really done it's job. No wonder everyday people buy 200,000 new gasoline vehicles while we already have this fantastic Model 3 available. They need a test drive and a good info session.

 

[neroden]

I was not referring to Tesla's communication improvements so perhaps in that context, it is a meaningless statement. I made that statement to highlight the level of exposure a prospective owner would have to FUD on the path towards ownership.

Ah, got it.

In any case, optimizing for automated order/delivery flow would free up employees to handle the unusual cases you speak of more effectively, don't you agree?

Yeah, I do agree.