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

[Thumper]

A diversified grid should be much more robust against hacking and natural disasters.

 

[Sudre]

Options I think are just over priced. 1000 strike Calls for this Friday are over 30 cents each. Tesla better deliver Cybertruck this Wednesday for the MMs to allow the price to be that high ($1000.30). Even then I bet something would come out to tank the price Friday 5 minutes before the bell. They should be worth around 10 cents each but illusion and rumors has volatility up super high.

900 Calls are selling like hotcakes. The price will NOT go above that. At least not without some tangible solid meat and potatoes.

Even if you remove manipulation because you don't believe in it, the options market is showing you what the masses that trade in that arena are thinking. It seems to me at least right now they are thinking low $800 for this Friday. IF the calls come down today I will buy a small $ just in case something is announced. It's just a lotto bet... and that is why the volatility is so high and they are priced too high. Too many people buying lotto tickets at the moment.

 

[Intl Professor]

Pls stop doing this FTFY nonsense. Everyday. It’s like an uncle you like who farts too much

How do you calibrate farts? Or to put it another way, what do you mean by too? Please be more specific as I'm an old one and curious minds want to know.

 

[adiggs]

Mr. Market looks to the near-term future, but doesn't go out on limbs.

Your 12 month time period for Battery Day tech delivery SP reward is too far out. If the new battery tech doesn't happen this calendar year, analysts will actually drop the stock price due to Osborning. So, the best outcome is if they announce new tech AND say they're shipping that tech "real soon."

Your point about S&P inclusion is true too, except that this is already widely anticipated, and may be what is already supporting the current stock price (as today's WSJ article indicates). I think Mr. Market will look to delivery guesses in May and of course actual numbers for the whole quarter to figure out potential GAAP profit in Q2. Q1 saw deliveries at 88,400 with an expectation at 77K or less (Tesla delivery expectations at 77,000 cars — can they beat that? - Electrek) so that was good and shows how wrongly they are at guessing deliveries.

I've been in a couple stocks that made the S&P 500, and while they got a boost, it was short-lived. Will TSLA be different?

You could certainly be right - I certainly can't say you're wrong. Both points support my larger belief that we're range bound for the time being in the 700-900 range. Because of the larger macro disconnect between the stock market and the economy (and not because of Tesla's performance), I still see dropping below 700 as the next significant change in the stock price vs a breakout above 900.

It's not because of Tesla's performance as a business. It is entirely due to how amazingly disconnected the stock market valuation of companies is from the underlying economy right now. And I don't see the two reconnecting due to amazing earnings growth in the next quarter to better than pre-pandemic levels.

(I want to be wrong about that).

 

[TheGrimSweeper]

Giga Berlin, let the pile driving begin.

 

[adiggs]

Interestingly enough the 900c 05/22 open interest increased to 8K. I don't know if traders/gamblers are expecting the volume to pick up if and when the TeraTexas announcement is made.

In terms of unusual option activity apparently there was a 1 million option trade(around 1000 940C contracts at 1.10 each) towards market close. It might have been a hedge so who knows. Just sharing information.

I haven't really been tracking this previously, but I've been seeing these stupendous volumes of options being bought / sold in the final week of trading, every week the last 3 weeks I've been noticing this. This very large sales on both sides pretty quickly establish a trading range in which it's hard for the shares to close outside of. By Friday, that trading range gets pretty narrow.

 

[adiggs]

Options I think are just over priced. 1000 strike Calls for this Friday are over 30 cents each. Tesla better deliver Cybertruck this Wednesday for the MMs to allow the price to be that high ($1000.30). Even then I bet something would come out to tank the price Friday 5 minutes before the bell. They should be worth around 10 cents each but illusion and rumors has volatility up super high.

...t.

I totally agree on the over priced nature of options. The IV is actually quite a bit lower right now relative to a couple months ago. It's been steadily shrinking, down now to the low 60's.

Anyway - that high price level of options is why I'm selling them!

 

[Off Shore]

How do you calibrate farts? Or to put it another way, what do you mean by too? Please be more specific as I'm an old one and curious minds want to know.

Volume and sulphur content, profe.

 

[XHabjab]

I see that the rumored Tesla land purchase East of Hutto TX (here) now has a pin title of "Tesla Terafactory Texas - option" on Google maps. The aerial view of the property below...

View attachment 542861

This is all still speculation of course. I hear from some local landowners though that there is some new construction in the area.

A local guy here flew his Piper Cherokee over the area yesterday (May 18) and took this photo of the proposed area (credit: L Tropiano).

This is essentially looking West, towards Hutto at the mid-top of the picture. The rail yard construction (described here) is at lower right next to the water tower. The property clearly still has an agricultural crop on it and there seem to be 4 or 5 active residences on the property. There is a tiny historical cemetery on the property as well. It is not clear how these things would be dealt with.

The road and railway at upper left to mid right is Highway US-79 and joint ownership Union Pacific/BNSF railway. The Reddit info here says that the property is 1480 acres. One of the items about UP is curious:

"After Tesla bought Fremont, UP refused to negotiate on pricing to ship cars from Fremont or ship batteries from Nevada. Tesla responded by ripping up the rail spur at Fremont(It is unclear when this happened, some time in or before 2017).

Based on this, I don't think UP would agree to let Tesla connect a spur to their line at this site in Texas. There is bad blood between UP leadership and Tesla, and they have a convenient excuse in that the communities along the line are already upset with UP about the number of trains that run along it. If they aren't allowed to build a spur, it doesn't matter that BNSF has rights to use the line, and would be willing to service the new factory."​

At this point in time, this is all still speculation but the facts seem to line up with Tesla buying the property and doing something with it.

 

[StealthP3D]

Options I think are just over priced. 1000 strike Calls for this Friday are over 30 cents each. Tesla better deliver Cybertruck this Wednesday for the MMs to allow the price to be that high ($1000.30). Even then I bet something would come out to tank the price Friday 5 minutes before the bell. They should be worth around 10 cents each but illusion and rumors has volatility up super high.

900 Calls are selling like hotcakes. The price will NOT go above that. At least not without some tangible solid meat and potatoes.

To say an out-of-the money option (like a $1000 strike call for this week) is "over-priced" is to say you feel you think you understand the odds of news that causes a breakout towards the strike price. Of course, whether a breakout happens or not is out of our control. Other than a "gut feeling", all we really have to go by is the previous behavior of the stock (and by that metric, options are ALWAYS over-valued).

All that said, I had a "gut" feeling so I bought one of those $30 lottery tickets just for fun.

I see this week's $1000 calls as being a MUCH better deal than next weeks which truly are more expensive than the extra week can justify. All of them will probably expire worthless but they might appreciate in the interim.

 

[skybluecgreen]

Some volume coming in on the buy side. Anyone seeing anything specific?

 

[elasalle]

TOS feed: JP Securities cuts price target from $1020 to $1001, keeps over weight ratings (no link)
Reuters and now Barrons rerunning story of China Vehicle Sales Plummet in April

IV is in lower 70%, so has dropped from the highs in upper 90's from few weeks back. (So option prices not moving as much)

 

[ZeApelido]

A local guy here flew his Piper Cherokee over the area yesterday (May 18) and took this photo of the proposed area (credit: L Tropiano).

View attachment 543021

This is essentially looking West, towards Hutto at the mid-top of the picture. The rail yard construction (described here) is at lower right next to the water tower. The property clearly still has an agricultural crop on it and there seem to be 4 or 5 active residences on the property. There is a tiny historical cemetery on the property as well. It is not clear how these things would be dealt with.

The road and railway at upper left to mid right is Highway US-79 and joint ownership Union Pacific/BNSF railway. The Reddit info here says that the property is 1480 acres. One of the items about UP is curious:

"After Tesla bought Fremont, UP refused to negotiate on pricing to ship cars from Fremont or ship batteries from Nevada. Tesla responded by ripping up the rail spur at Fremont(It is unclear when this happened, some time in or before 2017).

Based on this, I don't think UP would agree to let Tesla connect a spur to their line at this site in Texas. There is bad blood between UP leadership and Tesla, and they have a convenient excuse in that the communities along the line are already upset with UP about the number of trains that run along it. If they aren't allowed to build a spur, it doesn't matter that BNSF has rights to use the line, and would be willing to service the new factory."​

At this point in time, this is all still speculation but the facts seem to line up with Tesla buying the property and doing something with it.

Is Elon going to donate a trillion shards of grass to replace all those lost at this site?

And how are they going to migrate all the ants?

These important questions must keep Elon and Texas up all night...

 

[ZeApelido]

The lady from the Tesla VPP video came from this company.

AutoGrid

Seemingly competition, but they have just software. Have been around 9 years but seem to be going nowhere.

 

[Curt Renz]

TOS feed: JP Securities cuts price target from $1020 to $1001, keeps over weight ratings (no link)
Reuters and now Barrons rerunning story of China Vehicle Sales Plummet in April

IV is in lower 70%, so has dropped from the highs in upper 90's from few weeks back. (So option prices not moving as much)

Actually, Barron's is rather kind about it. Reporter Al Root is usually quite fair regarding Tesla.

Barron's - this morning: Tesla’s China Sales Plummeted in April. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Matter.

Excerpt:

It sounds like a big drop —and it is. The stock, however, isn’t budging, down a fraction in early Tuesday trading. Tesla bulls aren’t blind to bad news, but sequential sales aren’t that useful for investors. Every business, including Tesla (ticker: TSLA), is seasonal.

 

[StealthP3D]

Some volume coming in on the buy side. Anyone seeing anything specific?

View attachment 543025

I would say that looks like normal volatility.

 

[smorgasbord]

You could certainly be right - I certainly can't say you're wrong. Both points support my larger belief that we're range bound for the time being in the 700-900 range. Because of the larger macro disconnect between the stock market and the economy (and not because of Tesla's performance), I still see dropping below 700 as the next significant change in the stock price vs a breakout above 900.

It's not because of Tesla's performance as a business. It is entirely due to how amazingly disconnected the stock market valuation of companies is from the underlying economy right now. And I don't see the two reconnecting due to amazing earnings growth in the next quarter to better than pre-pandemic levels.

(I want to be wrong about that).

Many previous Bull markets have actually been the result of "climbing a wall of worry" in what is thought to have been a Bear market. Right now, it appears that Wall St. believes in a "V" shape recovery. Remember most restaurants aren't public companies, and we've already seen everything from Neiman Marcus to Gold's Gym declaring bankruptcy, companies concentrated in discretionary items, like Harley Davidson, are being hurt, as is all of travel of course. There's the obvious emphasis on companies that support working from home paradigms (eg Zoom) and of course shopping from home (Amazon ticks all the right boxes there with Prime Video as well) - but even here seeing Walmart shut down Jet.com just proves that you have to not just be in the right place at the right time, you need to have the right product/service and do that well.

I agree this optimism is somewhat narrow-minded: just looking at companies that do well in this work-from-home world, or that enable people to do things online instead of in-person misses that there are tens of millions (in the US alone) who don't have jobs. Which maybe is why Amazon stock hasn't gone through the roof - while people are buying more stuff online than before, there are fewer people able to buy stuff at all. And that unemployed number is still growing. BTW, I was reading an interview with some Harvard professors who had written a well received book on the Great Depression, and one of the things they dismissed was the differences between the US efforts of giving money to the unemployed versus the European style of giving money to small business to keep their people employed. They said the end results were going to mostly be the same, and that recovery wouldn't happen quickly or forcefully enough to keep those Eurpoean businesses from eventually having to lay people off anyway.

But, Mr. Market's thinking appears to be that unlike the previous depressions and recessions, since this one was artificially and intentionally made it can be much more quickly unwound. That does seem true for some sectors to some degree, but again I think that misses the much slower to unwind changes that have already happened. Unemployment is the big one, but there are others as well - and I'm not expert enough to be able to identify them.

At any rate, the market responds to things like any positive vaccine news as indications that the turn-around really could be sooner than expected and more "V" than "U". What they're probably missing is that it's going to be a "W".

 

[elasalle]

Christophe Barraud on Twitter

 

[adiggs]

Many previous Bull markets have actually been the result of "climbing a wall of worry" in what is thought to have been a Bear market. Right now, it appears that Wall St. believes in a "V" shape recovery.

Totally agree with this, especially for Tesla.

My own read (highly subjective and personal) is that among Tesla bulls as present in this artificially self - selected group as represented here - there's no worry on that front. It seems like people here are overwhelmingly in the camp that TSLA is going up (a lot) in the short term.

EDIT: I see no particular worry here - just a lot of frustration that we're not double today's price because of manipulators.

I'm totally in the long term going up (a lot) camp - the 2012 shares I've been holding all along are still being held, with an investment hypothesis that leaves a non-zero possibility that I'll own them when I die.


Short term, I see flat to down.


I appreciate the additional perspectives. That's what I get from this forum and what I'm looking for. I'm especially looking for the reasons for the perspectives, rather than the conclusions, and you've done an excellent job of presenting those. Thank you for that @smorgasbord .

 

[ZachF]

Why does it feel like BNEF was created purely to warp reality? Their renewables projections have been way off forever, now only 28% of new passenger car sales will be EV in 2030? There's literally zero chance of that.

A monkey with a dartboard could do better than they have.