TSLA Market Action: 2018 Investor Roundtable

[Johan]

Agreed, But find the $70B first. No money no talk.

Why would 70 billion dollars be required? You're talking as if the investors in question should anticipate having to buy everything outstanding share of TSLA in existence. Surely you understand that this is not anywhere near a realistic estimate?

 

[Jayjs20]

And I'm back in, with shares. 333 is a round number, right? No more crazy option plays for me, for the time being.

Didn't catch 368 like some of you, but 370 is good enough. I was thinking i would have to buy at 385 yesterday.

 

[Tslynk67]

That is if you assume Musk is lying about the funding. Seriously? Do we expect him to do this?

Us no, but almost everyone else, yes

 

[shlokavica22]

There were no proper filters online, so I went through all the open interest for $400+ CALL options and added them up for all expiries, then multiplied the number of contracts by 100 to get to the number of shares.

Lower strike price call options are way too expensive for shorts to use as a long-term hedge I believe due to the volatility premium and time value, plus I suspect a lot of the CALLs are not short hedges but leveraged longs so this might be over-counting it.

But I could have botched the calculation completely: where does your 500,000 call contracts figure come from?

I understand. For the calls >$400 you might be correct.
This source shows 617,781 Call Open Interest: Tesla Inc. (TSLA) Open Interest Trends

 

[Boomer19]

Are you sure about those numbers? What is your source?
Last time I looked it was >500,000 call contracts.

@Fact Checking use occ website

https://www.theocc.com/webapps/series-search

search TSLA

OCC open interest search returns;
617,856 calls
1,119,644 puts

includes single stock futures

i couldn’t attach .xlsx file. and didn’t have time to convert it.

 

[Tslynk67]

Prohibiting women from having civil rights? Imprisoning bloggers for criticizing the government? Imprisoning clerics for giving unorthodox views on religion?!? *Documented war crimes* in Yemen? Uh, yeah, Saudi Arabia makes lots of human rights violations

Sorry, neroden, but just for a moment there I thought you were talking about the Trump regime!

 

[bro1999]

To be fair, if you assume 100% that he’s not lying, then putting your entire life savings, everything you have, into TSLA right now is the sensible thing to do. Guaranteed >=13% return, likely in less than a year. Yet, how many of us are doing that?

The question isn’t whether you think Elon’s telling the truth/lying but the degree to which you believe those are probable. For better or worse, he just narrowed down the entire short/bear thesis to a single, binary question: Is he telling the truth?

The question is what does "funding secured" actually mean? Let's assume he does have funding secured and all that needs to happen is the dotting of i's and crossing of t's (and a shareholder yes vote). A Tesla acquisition would still need to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, to clear any national security concerns. We all know how the current Cheeto administration loves to use and abuse the "national security" clause. Especially if majority of the funding is from Chinese or Saudi investors.

 

[Revhappy2]

Good article and none of you guys can actually defend EM on this:
Elon Musk Has Some Fun With Tesla

 

[Tslynk67]

And I'm back in, with shares. 333 is a round number, right? No more crazy option plays for me, for the time being.

Didn't catch 368 like some of you, but 370 is good enough. I was thinking i would have to buy at 385 yesterday.

Wait and see, eh? You have history here, you know - no offence!

 

[ZeApelido]

He is good at raising money. But persuading people to lose $70 billion is a different league from persuading people to lose $9 billion.

Well, he's persuaded you to lose money...

 

[Fact Checking]

Are you sure about those numbers? What is your source?
Last time I looked it was >500,000 call contracts.

I have messed up my calculation, on a second count it's higher. I have removed my comment - it has fundamentally flawed figures.

But most of the options I missed appear to be far out of the money options with $500+ strike prices, which, even if all of them were short hedges (I don't think they are), would still cause steep, $10b+ losses for shorts.

So I think a substantial portion of the short positions are naked - but the proof for that is a lot less conclusive than I thought ...

 

[Johan]

Good article and none of you guys can actually defend EM on this:
Elon Musk Has Some Fun With Tesla

Goes to show that anything can be published on Bloomberg.com. He confuses "public" with "private" a lot that author. On my ignore list you go Revhappy2, and all your 34 previous posts on this board.

 

[Fact Checking]

This source shows 617,781 Call Open Interest: Tesla Inc. (TSLA) Open Interest Trends

Yes, that figure is why I started counting the open interest manually ...

So if we just do back of the napkin math and assume that 70% of the open interest is for in the money and near the money options (not used by shorts with significant short positions due to the cost involved), and 50% of the CALL options are held by shorts as a hedge and the other half by longs, then we'd arrive at ~15% of 617k, which is 92k open contracts, equivalent to about 9 million shares.

Still 26 million shares short naked.

But note that this relies on my (fairly speculative) guesses about the composition of the open CALL interest.

 

[dailo]

Any thoughts on going dark?

Tesla Delisting And Going Dark. Going Private Is A Euphemism. - jsberg | Seeking Alpha

 

[omarsultan]

I get the feeling that some of the pushback from financial journalists is that, if Tesla goes private, they might actually have to do some work again or at least exert enough effort to find some other company to write click-baity articles about.

 

[Jayjs20]

Wait and see, eh? You have history here, you know - no offence!

Comon now, that was when I was new. If not for my calls going way off a cliff yesterday, I'd be massively up. First time it hit 385, I hit 6 figures for the first time. Yesterday, before the privatization, I was 70% over that when the SP hit 370. I'd like to think that I've made plenty of good trades since then.

 

[Tslynk67]

Why would 70 billion dollars be required? You're talking as if the investors in question should anticipate having to buy everything outstanding share of TSLA in existence. Surely you understand that this is not anywhere near a realistic estimate?

Indeed, remove Elon's 20% and you're already down to $56b

Although there's been much discussion that certain funds can't stay as investors due to the lack of liquidity, so even if everyone else stayed-in, they'd need to be funded.

 

[TintDepot.com]

Good article and none of you guys can actually defend EM on this:
Elon Musk Has Some Fun With Tesla

Interesting read.

 

[Cosmacelf]

The only thing not sure is the purchase price. Some shareholders might want a higher price.

Then they can decide to not sell at $420. This isn’t a normal private take over if existing shareholders can remain shareholders. The price is irrelevant to most longs

 

[Unpilot]

Good article and none of you guys can actually defend EM on this:
Elon Musk Has Some Fun With Tesla

That is a Bloomberg OPINION piece. You know what they say about opinions.....right?