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

[Artful Dodger]

I mentioned this before. I sold majority of my shares pre-maturely when it was going up at 700 & 780. (as I needed it to pay off my Model 3 and other needs) and still have some shares for long term, which has cost basis of 200 or less. I only have X remaining now, and would be buying more on dip as needed. I actually purchased some UBER as I saw it going up before earnings.
How about you?

That's good, thanks for your honesty. For me, it's 22 mths now since I established my core postion in TSLA. My last buy was 50 @ $341 and I have a $284 cost basis. Indeed, I starting with about 3% of my net worth in TSLA, and now its grown to about 9%. Even so, I made 3x more on real estate during that time than I did on TSLA, and I spent exactly 6 days working on it.

But I'm also not against dabbling in some day trading to increase my share count while punishing the Shortzes when they push stupid *sugar* like after the Joe Rogan podcast. Trading gains go into more TSLA shares; its about +10% so really peanuts, but its some fun. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. About 2:1 +/- I'd guess.

But as I've said, I'm really not here for the 20 dollar swings, or even the $200 swings (held strong from $380 thru $178 and now from $968 to $687). A few more bucks will not change my life. But a 10- or 20- bagger might.

No, instead I choose to spend time here every day, for these 3 reasons:

1. to support Elon's goal of making the future a place worth visiting,
2. to fight Big Carbon/climate deniers/disinformation against EVs/renewables
3. to hold my shares for 10+ years to add to my legacy for the next generation

My idea's are pretty simple. So here are some more profound thoughts from Elon Musk:

1. When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
2. If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not.
3. There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
4. When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.
5. Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.
6. It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.
7. If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic-being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.
8. We're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
9. The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.
10. I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.
11. I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up for me. Now, Let's Roll!

Cheers!

 

[Tslynk67]

The cost of options right now is astronomical on both sides of the trade. On a day like this, I think i might just wait for the premium to come down.

It's very appealing for those that want to sell some options though

 

[Aeon]

I have a bit of confusion here:
An Option I am following quite suddenly lost when comparing to the underlying.

Everything is in Euro. As you can see, at the beginning of the day they tracked quite closely jumping red-green-red similarily. But the option basically didn't follow the Nasdaq opening spike at all.
Is this to be expected? At all? Am I seeing a surprisingly drastic value loss due to IV loss here?

 

[Dan Detweiler]

I post this here solely for the purpose of confirming rollout.

I just got confirmation of my HW3 update for next Wednesday! 2.5 cars ARE being upgraded, and not just in California. YAY!

Dan

 

[Tslynk67]

With that big dip it will be interesting to see if the MM's allow $TSLA to rise back up to $745

 

[rsm287]

Somebody trying very hard to push it down at the moment.

 

[scubastevo80]

what peril is in store for people who don't care who knows how many shares they own? is it merely moderator-induced peril because it is annoying, or is there some other reason?

Alternatively, because people on the internet make things up and then you could have younger and more naive investors following the advice/activity of someone whose activity isn't even real, thus leading into the FOMO we keep posting about.

 

[lascavarian]

All my calculations are based not on $ ROI, but # of shares ROI.

Investing money into an option instead of shares, costs me x number of shares, and payouts I also calculate in number of shares.

So in that specific example, I mean that there are significant diminishing returns at some point. The option will increase in $ value, but due to the underlying stock also rapidly increasing in cost, the # of shares you can buy per contract is indeed limited to 100.

My point was that converting those specific contracts to 60 shares at that price, is a pretty good deal, because even if the SP is twice ($2,000) upon expiration, I'd only gain an additional 15 shares, aka 20% more shares.

I am quite confident it will go higher than $1,000 by Jan'22, and I'd be able to convert them to more shares than 60 per contract, but it also means having that money tied up in the option contracts, and not being able to use them to buy other options when a good opportunity presents itself. Also, in some worst case scenarios and stock price somehow being <$500 upon expiration, I'd lose all of the money, whereas shares are of course much safer to hold.

Thanks for hanging in with me for me to understand. I see that your are talking shares rather than currencies and that clarifies. Let me give you an example of my own to see if I understand it correctly.

With a stock share price of (for example) $100, a single option is purchased for $1 (x 100 = $100 but I am not going to worry about that in this example) with a strike price of $500 and expiration of Jan '22. At some point prior to but near expiration the stock share share price reaches $1000. The option could be exercised for 100 shares.

In this case the investment on the option resulted in getting 100 shares (minus the initial $100 investment) resulting in a gain of 100 shares for a stock price movement of 900 points or 500 points above the strike price.

If stock was held just a little longer and the stock share price suddenly reached $2,000. The additional movement of 1,000 points would result in a dollar appreciation of $100,000 but the stock purchased beyond the first 100 shares would now come at a price of 2,000 per share so only 50 shares would be received.

So in this scenario, the first 900 points of price appreciation (100 to 1,000) yields 100 shares.

The second run of 1,000 points (1,000 to 2,000) only yields 50 shares.

So there is a point of diminishing stock returns that starts at the point of exercise value equaling the option contract price of 100 shares.

Have I essentially got your thinking?

 

[Causalien]

A mod chickening out, now that’s a story. I saw some people have been referring to my decision to liquidate my whole TSLA position after the SP came crashing down from 960. Why that happened? Lately I had been too much focussed on the effect of the stock movements on the financial value of my portfolio, which at the top was up 720k, and a few trading hours later was up 520k. After having ridden the SP down from 300 to 178 in the spring of 2019 I thought I had balls of steel. But my stomach was the problem. It churned. So I bailed.

At first that felt good, the uncertainty was gone. But that didn’t last long. In fact, just a few hours.

I am a true believer in a bright future for Tesla. It will be the #1 technology brand in the world. And likely the most valuable company in the world. I believe the stock value will go up at least 10x and maybe even 20x. But in the heat of the moment I lost sight of all of that.

It felt as if I had betrayed Elon, who several times went through hell to save Tesla. And as if I had betrayed all the steadfast longs here, a lot of whom I’ve started to appreciate over the last years. I visited this thread yesterday, but felt like an outsider. I saw you guys complain and cheer, but couldn’t join you.

I started to watch some videos. Cathy Wood. Ron Baron. David Lee. The ones by David were especially helpful. I started to realize that I had to focus less on the swings and look more at the long trend and focus on the long term goal I’ve set for myself. And if it drops 100-200 points, that doesn’t make much difference because we know it will be 10-bagger or 20-bagger. I got my confidence back. Huge shout out to @DaveT.

So today I decided to get back in. All in. No timing, because in the end it doesn’t really matter if you get in at 735 or 765. Or even 550, 650 or 850. I ended up buying at 745, which does lower the base price for my shares by 15 points to 225 (but that’s no reason to do this again!).

It feels incredibly good to be back in! And even if it goes down, maybe even by a lot, I’ll hang in there. With all of you. Because I know what the goal is and I know we will get there. There will be a lot of dips along the way, but that’s okay.

So I hope you guys will take back the lost son...

It will be helpful to take a moment to remember that feeling you have at the top.

Then the feeling when it dropped too much for you to handle. Relive it again so you can remember them.

When this happens again in the future. (or any time something triples at a high enough number. In your case it is in the 100k+ range now) Sell 33% of your holdings. Wait a day and see if you still think selling is a good idea.

 

[DrMazeppa]

Shorts trying to break pre-Monday buying exuberance?

 

[Nocturnal]

I have a tin-foil hat theory that says that part of the reason why GF Austin might be the spot is that John Goodenough does his research at UT. For those who don't know, he invented the lithium ion battery, and has apparently been working on solid state batteries with other researchers. Some people have connected some dots that suggest he has also been working with Tesla for some time.

That could definitely be a case of correlation (lots of tech talent in that area) vs causation, but it is interesting.

 

[Mich]

I have a bit of confusion here:
An Option I am following quite suddenly lost when comparing to the underlying.
View attachment 508947

Everything is in Euro. As you can see, at the beginning of the day they tracked quite closely jumping red-green-red similarily. But the option basically didn't follow the Nasdaq opening spike at all.
Is this to be expected? At all? Am I seeing a surprisingly drastic value loss due to IV loss here?

In my experience the premium on European options are higher before Nasdaq opens regular trading hours.

 

[Causalien]

At the end of October, I noticed that IV of LEAPS was well below 40%. I found that to be insanely low and it probably has reflected the fact that for several years prior TSLA was range bounds, so historic volatility was low. Apparently iv was even lower before (?). I have also figured at that time that Tesla has reached the point where it has not merely produced the best premium cars, but it also would become the lowest cost premium car maker. Moreover, the market would soon realize that. So I figured that TSLA will break out from the range bound, and option prices with low IV-s are mispriced.
Then I acted on it and a couple of days later I signed up also to this forum. I keep striving to post absolutely accurate negative comments about Tesla that gathers the most disagreements. (Going to seekingalpha to learn negative things about Tesla, no longer works. All TSLAQ articles are either manipulative garbage or clueless.) I feel since TSLAQ does not help us find the problems we have to do it.

To get back to IV: A vlogger who disassembles battery (name? link?) made a youtube video a little bit later presenting his options trading strategy based on the mispriced options with low IV. He bought a bunch of OTM calls and puts. His strategy was correct.
To summarize: Options were mispriced with very low iv-s couple months ago. The higher iv reflects the fact that TSLA became much more volatile. I have no clue whether the current options are priced correctly now or not.

At iv of 80% I usually do certain trades targeting a return to normmal vol of 40%. It is extremely lucrative at 125%

But you were right about oct. The thing about options is, unless you day trade and monitor it all the time, it gets easy to miss these things as there are too many variables to investigate.

To be honest the past few weeks have been lucrative, but I am nearing the end of my stamina keeping up with analysis all the time since trading is not my main focus in life.

 

[WMTribe90]

Bought 10 at $736 with swing trade shares. Believe battle to day will be for $750 and battle on Monday for $800.

 

[KarenRei]

Model Y is more efficient than Model 3? How do they achieve that?

I'll offer a caveat to the above:

Model 3 MR RWD about the same efficiency as the heavier, dual motor LR AWD? SR+ being much more efficient than the SR-, despite them being the same car, just with the latter software locked?

What you're seeing here is simply the result of obsolete test data. Test data isn't updated in real-time, but Teslas get more efficient all the time. So have some grains of salt when comparing Model Y data to Model 3 data.

That said, it looks like they've done a superb job.

 

[Aeon]

In my experience the premium on European options are higher before Nasdaq opens regular trading hours.

Mmmh. Well. The spread has been higher. I think 7 vs 2 cents today. But that should have minor chart influence, no?

And can it truly be generally true that it's more expensive before Nasdaq open?! It can't be right? That'd be an arbitrage opportunity. Nah...

 

[Curt Renz]

Somebody trying very hard to push it down at the moment.

The macro-market has been dropping while dragging TSLA with it as coronavirus fears increase.

Meanwhile, it's a Friday and TSLA weekly options are expiring. Based on pre-market open interest, Opricot calculates MaxPain as $730. The current true MaxPain can change throughout a session. A cursory survey of expiring option data makes it appear that $750 should be a more realistic MaxPain target for big option writers.

For now the macro-market and coronavirus fears appear to be at the center stage. That could change regarding TSLA during these final hours of regular trading.

 

[azaz]

For any one playing short term the coil is definitely tight according to @ReflexFunds and a possible trigger either way could be wether or not China does go back up for business Monday both for Tesla and others

 

[Maitri982]

Lucid: Tesla hasn't cracked it, we can take it to whole new level of range and efficiency - Electrek

Sorry if someone posted already. Lucid guy talking big about being better than Tesla without a single car made and sold.

But you know, if Fred was impressed than we all should be

 

[RobStark]

RobStark, ask and you shall receive. Here is another photo from the back.
This is an entire new bus design from the ground up for TTC.

View attachment 508912

Is that the Jaguar I-Pace of BEV Municipal Busses ?

That rear window is the size of an I-Pace frunk.