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

[Artful Dodger]

Can we have another thread or something for tracking Lee’s deteriorating sanity? Has nothing to do with investing at this point. He’s just panic and fear driven.

Disgree about moving the discussion elsewhere. Lee stooped to spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt after his huge options gamble collapsed with margin call(s) at the Dec 27 low. Worse, he continued to use his faulty logic and emotional acting out. Not a good mindset for either traders, or investors (though not surprisingly, quite common on social media).

Fighting FUD is one of the MOST IMPORTANT purposes of this thread. We investors that resisted his FUD are up 75% since the Jan 6 low.

I don’t think he’s said any specifics.

Lee published some youtube vids about his options strategies, but that was more than 3 mths ago. Recently, he's been tight-lipped about Options.

 

[Maarten]

A big AI compliment to everyone here!
Please proceed as usual.
(Forget the bird recommendation... AI not 100% perfect yet.)

 

[Artful Dodger]

I’m not sure about the fetid waters of insider trading laws so hard for me to say how that would float.

Those rules don't apply to the Company itself, just against individuals profiting from their knowledge of the Company: IE:

"SEC Rule 10b-5 prohibits corporate officers and directors or other insider employees from using confidential corporate information to reap a profit (or avoid a loss) by trading in the Company's stock. This rule also prohibits “tipping” of confidential corporate information to third parties."​

The other big concern in my eyes is what happens to the SP if they need that cash and have to sell billions of shares back. Perhaps that’s what the line of credit is for.

That's what "Puts" are good for.

 

[MartinAustin]

Nothing to do with Tesla directly, except, the legacy automakers are falling to bits IMO and we're seeing it happen in micro-speed Auto giants Renault and Nissan overhaul their decades-long alliance

 

[WADan]

'Tesla was *the only brand* buyers chose again more than half the time' sounds like a really low bar

Yup, that is true considering the highest owner satisfaction of Tesla:

Tesla Has Highest Owner Rating Based On Data From Multiple Sites

A driver's ed website compiled data from multiple car owner rating websites and determined that Tesla owners appear more satisfied than owners of rival cars.

insideevs.com

 

[chrsk]

187$ in pre market. Will be interesting today.

 

[ThisStockGood]

I'm not sure if this has been posted here before (apologize if that is the case). But I found this speculative video about the "Project Highland" quite interesting. If you need to kill 40 minutes before pre-market opens, I recommend watching.

 

[Dreadnought]

I'd like to discuss the possibility that Tesla did a share buyback during 2022 Q4. Take a look at this excerpt from the Earnings Letter:

Tesla 2022-Q4 "Cash Flows from Investing Activities"​

View attachment 901206

Notice that Tesla reported "Purchases of investments" of $4,368M in Q4, vs an average of $392M in the previous 4 quarters. This is a substantial jump in investments of over 11x.

While its true that yields on Treasury bonds did increase in Q4 (making them more attractive), let's examine another possibility: Tesla may have repurchased the ~22M shares total that it issued during the Sep 2020 and Dec 2020 Cap raises.

If that is the number of shares purchased, Tesla would only have needed to achieve a DCA of ~$195 per share on their purchases for 22M shares. Even this DCA seems high given the SP decrease, and steady Volume increase in TSLA throughout December:

View attachment 901208

However, If Tesla was able to achieve (for example) a DCA of $132/share in Q4, that would result in ~33M shares added to their treasury. And with YTD gains (actually, let's use the hypothetical DCA example of $132), then Tesla would have paper gains of ~$1.5B as of Friday.

If Tesla did purchase Treasury Shares in Q4 (that is, purchased TSLA on the Open Market, held in their Cash/equivalents Accounts), it should be reported in the 10-K (possibly this week). I'm curious to know more about the investments purchased.

Cheers to the Longs!

That's quite a chunk of money. If there had been any strategic acquisition, I suppose we'd have heard of meanwhile. Therefore, I cannot think of a better explanation than a buyback but would welcome any insight from people that are more imaginative than me.

Also, is this counted against FCF, thus sandbagging the 2022 results? My understanding is that only capex gets subtracted from operating CF. Appreciate comments from folks with a firmer grip on accounting matters.

Pure speculation but possibly maybe they still had a standing buy order on Friday which provided the bottom to those strange downspikes to $159.23?

 

[Buckminster]

Threads of the day:
TSLA buyback
Project Highland (Investor impact etc.) New

 

[EVMeister]

187$ in pre market.

Not sure where you're looking, but that's not correct.

Edit: Frankfurt? No offence, but now NASDAQ premarket has opened it shows how little relevance Frankfurt trading has on things.

 

[SebastienBonny]

Not sure where you're looking, but that's not correct.

Edit: Frankfurt? No offence, but no NASDAQ premarket has opened it shows how little relevance Frankfurt trading has on things.

Yeah. Real pre-open now 173, so some retracement for now, but still early.

 

[Stretch2727]

Did not see this posted here.

GM Switching To Cylindrical Battery Cells - CleanTechnica

GM and LGES have broken off talks about building a fourth US battery factory together after GM decided to switch to 4680 cells in the future.

cleantechnica.com

My guess is they have had further failures in testing and with all the Bolt issues decided to switch.

Only took them about 1 1/2 years from Elon's tweet.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1433670656315600919

Now I think I understand why there were so few Hummers and Lyriq (<100 each) for the 4th quarter 2022 for GM. The Hummer plant was shutdown for the month of December as well. This looks to be a real disaster for GM but they have said nothing.


Edit: Added comment on low deliveries for Q4 2022.

 

[Max Plaid]

What sort of fruit do you squeeze to make burnt hair smell? Asking for a friend.

 

[SN_8]

A big AI compliment to everyone here!
Please proceed as usual.
(Forget the bird recommendation... AI not 100% perfect yet.)

​

ChatGPT knew exactly what it was saying. And if AI has already learned how to subtly trigger the mods with that Twitter comment, we'll all be replaced sooner than we think.

 

[jw934]

Pure speculation but possibly maybe they still had a standing buy order on Friday which provided the bottom to those strange downspikes to $159.23?

For reference, here’s the chart on the strange premarket down spikes to $159.23 on 2023-1-27, in case somebody else can suggest an explanation.

 

[Buckminster]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1620002538945933313

Thread above on how VW are delaying peak investment for 2-3 years. Are they waiting to copy Tesla RT? Unlikely.

We won people. Remember this moment. You will forever be remembered as the investor who saw the future and had the kiwi fruit to bet on it.

 

[SmokyPeat]

That's quite a chunk of money. If there had been any strategic acquisition, I suppose we'd have heard of meanwhile. Therefore, I cannot think of a better explanation than a buyback but would welcome any insight from people that are more imaginative than me.

Also, is this counted against FCF, thus sandbagging the 2022 results? My understanding is that only capex gets subtracted from operating CF. Appreciate comments from folks with a firmer grip on accounting matters.

Pure speculation but possibly maybe they still had a standing buy order on Friday which provided the bottom to those strange downspikes to $159.23?

Dogecoin? Jk, I'm thinking it was probably bonds.

 

[aubreymcfato]

Can you say "outlier"?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1619821511015305216

I will unearth this post of mine from 2018:

Not saying anything new, but...
I'm reading Network science by Albert-László Barabási¹: he's famous for his mathematical models of real networks (like the World Wide Web), and his definition of scale-free networks, which are basically the famous "long tail" that Anderson described some years ago.
This kind of networks (and power laws) are all over the place: this is why you have few hubs (Google, Facebook, Amazon) that collect a huge percentage of the links of the web, and the millions of remaining websites just keep the change. Power laws follow the famous Pareto principle: 20% of the nodes keep 80% of the links... And these proportions could be even more skewed.

The work of Barabási is to study and recreate these kind of networks, discovering new ways to end up with the same highly asymettrical distribution. Not all real networks are the same, but somehow they end up being really similar.

Another interesting variable, for Barabási, is "fitness", meaning that every link created by one node in the network remains forever. For example, a company that makes every new customer into a loyal partner.
He demonstrated mathematically that if the fitness of one node is high enough, this node can become an hub even if its initial conditions in the network are way worse than other nodes. For example, he's the new shop in town, or the new EV startup in a world of huge, century-old OEMs...

I found this model² directly interesting for Tesla. This is why the M3 ramp up is so important: every new customer will be a EV owner, and a Tesla customer, for life. This accelerates the rise of Tesla as an hub, a one of the few winners in his own network. And remember that power laws follow an exponential curve: Tesla will be exponentially bigger than his peers, provided that continues to do good (and steady). Every new car is a link more in the network, and Tesla needs it to grow and go on top of the others.

¹ Albert-László Barabási - Wikipedia. He's also the author of Link, which I recommend to everyone.
² Bianconi-Barabási model, for those of you that are interested

 

[jw934]

Reports are still coming in since November of EA chargers frying cars and in at least two cases welding themselves to the car charge port. I’ve heard EA continues to have multiple challenges with their supplier but have not heard of this one. At least in other cases you can drive off to find another working charger nearby.

 

[2daMoon]

I find that EA report quite ... shocking.