For one, it comes from people who have been very wrong about this stock for several years.

Secondly, the reasoning is flawed. The number of people in high level positions have left the company, but they haven't been with the company for a long period to begin with. TSLA is not a company for everyone. It's laughable to say the Finance department is shielded - what a bunch of nonsense.

You've been told by your betters including corporate accountants that the level of turnover is beyond highly unusual going into bizarre (if there's no fraud). Even without that the facts are plain - Tesla has extremely generous executive compensation and yet the entire accounting team are collectively leaving 10s of millions on the table to GTFO. Right as Tesla is turning itself around and becoming permanently profitable.

The CAO lasted 10 days. 10 days! We have ample evidence that Musk is an incompetent dickhead who can't work with or listen to others, so that makes it a little less bad, but even with that this is highly abnormal.

Now the CFO quits (fair enough, not reading anything into that) and is being replaced by a 31 year old kid with no real experience. This is so absurdly abnormal. A kid with no experience can't and shouldn't be CFO of a highly complex auto manufacturer. A CFO is not a CEO or even a COO, in which youthful genius can do well. It's a position that needs a lot of real world experience to do competently. There's just no reason to hire someone so green if everything is ok.

Both those guys genuinely thought his $250 puts would open in the green, it's ignorance as much as anything. Proton said he'd gladly pay $3.1 for them well now they are worth half that, how else should we interpret?

It's not a lie if...

Good time to be writing options

People buy options because they think they're smarter than their bankroll implies.

Or they have an opinion on the distribution of future stock prices rather than expected value, but usually the former

Obviously I was posting in the moment and was pretty caught up emotionally in the surprise ending to the call thinking Tesla would crash this morning.

But even when calm and thinking about it rationally did not imagine Tesla would be green today. I didn't see you predicting that either. Feel free to post your own predictions- the last one I saw was you predicting Tesla could break out of its range around $360 and it promptly dropped 20%+.

You predicted bankruptcy and/or Elon out by end of Q1, it's not my fault you are emotionally invested. I've lost money in this name playing puts lifetime so don't act like you are the only one that has been there. What I've realized is that most of the short term put trades lifetime in this thread are losers. Some of the guys have been able to play the range but most like this are poorly planned and executed.

Hey, I resemble this remark!

I wouldn't expect the market to be rational, especially not now, especially this stock.
Tesla goinh bankrupt next week is a bear fantasy. Rational bear case should be based on Tesla trading like its peers.
Even more rational is to buy puts around 350 and cover under 300.

Maye musk is gonna be pissed


Honestly site should be better than it is

I'm curious, why is this actually significant and not a result of standard logistics management? I live near some large national car distribution sites of a small country, and they have massive parking sites with hundreds of cars on site at all times (I have a hard time to guess how much but easily bigger than any individual picture I saw on tslaq).

They are all obviously much bigger brands than Tesla, but I still am confused why a few sites with some 100s of cars is an indication of trouble.

I think Tesla will remain in a tight financial position for many more years, but I don't think they will face significant issues with demand if they execute well, and don't ramp up production to ridiculous levels. I think people are overlooking that at the moment it is impossible to get a Tesla within a reasonable period of time between ordering and delivery in most (all?) of the world, and this is a major factor in the decision making process of people buying new cars. I think as delivery times come down more people will start considering Tesla as well, and they will be fine for quite some time as a result of that.

The actual "evidence" shown by the efforts behind this site may or may not be significant, but the overall narrative is significant because for years Elon has insisted that they are supply constrained and that the demand side includes hundreds of thousands of buyers ready and willing to pay for the M3 and the only thing preventing fulfillment of both reservations and non-reserved demand is their ability to effectively scale production. If this were true, then lots should never fill up with M3s, all vehicles coming off the production line should be nearly immediately delivered to fulfill existing reservations. If that is not what is occurring, they may be facing a demand cliff at a price point significantly below their "profitable" production capabilities. This means fulfilling these reservations/orders would lead to significant losses without significantly lowering the cost of production. They are stuck between selling currently produced vehicles at a loss negating the "profitable going forward" narrative, or selling increasingly fewer vehicles per month/quarter negating the "unlimited and untapped demand" narrative. It's a tough spot to be in, and there doesn't seem to be an easy answer for significantly reducing the per vehicle production costs, or they'd already have done this.

What are you basing your assessment on? Can you give me a reasonable explanation? It's absolute nonsense that a few hundred cars in a parking lot means they are making up numbers. You've probably never worked in a company that manufactures stuff. This is absolutely normal and people have been telling the bears not to focus on this - yet they do and hence lose substantial amounts of money.

If what you're saying is true this should be pretty easy to proof by calculating inventory turnover ratio, right?

Lets look at Tesla's Q4 statements:
Since Tesla does not break down its inventory across its segments, this wont be perfect, but I'm going to use conservative assumptions.

Q4 COGS of automotive sales are at $4,7b, lets assume COGS automotive sales are at an annual run rate of $18b (no leasing/other segments included!), since it wouldn't be fair to look at full year figures for Tesla given its significant growth rate.

Inventory on 31/12/2018 is at 3,1b. I'm going to assume this is all related to automotive sales. However, inventory in Q2 and Q3 was slightly higher (3,3b). I'm going to assume they try to cook the books a bit in Q4 every year and will use 3,3b for my calculation.

This translates into an inventory turnover rate of 5,4 or 68 days.

Lets compare this to VAG & BMW:

VAG:
COGS 188b
inventory 40,4b
=4,7x inventory turnover rate or 78 days


BMW:
COGS 79b
stock 13b
=6,1X or 60 days

It might make more sense to compare to other American-based car manufacturers or smaller scale car manufacturers which operate at a scale comparable to Tesla, but there doesn't seem to be anything special about Tesla's inventory turnover rate, unless if you expect it to significantly outperform its competitors due to the supply-constraints at Tesla. But I'm not sure that's fair, especially since I'm guessing that Tesla cars on average spend more time getting to their destination than BMW and VAG, since BMW and VAG have a huge amount of plants.

Poker

here's the thing though:
that's exactly what you would expect if you LISTENED TO THE CEO OF THE COMPANY.
and why people were curious about the parking lots full of cars. and what got us this gem from the conference call where he basically acknowledged that he was talking bs:

Elon Musk:
'The demand for - the demand for Model 3 is insanely high. The inhibitor is affordability. It's just like people literally don't have the money to buy the car. It's got nothing to do with desire. They just don't have enough money in their bank account. If the car can be made more affordable, the demand is extraordinary.'

you know what would also have more demand if it were cheaper?

He blocked me so I doubt it, really sad he blocked me actually

Local news reports on the "Gigafactory" II, which is coming along nicely.

It's looks like he's overcoming production problems and ramping up at the solar factory:

Former Tesla workers paint grim picture of Buffalo plant

Tesla, which has received $750 million from a state in the form of taxes that could be spent on teachers, homeless shelters, legal aid, etc, in return for promising to have 1460 jobs by 2020, does this:
Nothing to see here folks. Musk is an honest man and not a fraud at all. Or if he is a fraud on this stuff, he's scrupulously honest about Tesla and production and all the accounting numbers therein.

I've been following this thread for years now, and it's seemed almost since I began that bankruptcy was just months or maybe at most a year or two away. The bear case presented here is often compelling, and when I hear the bull case it always seems sort of hand-wavy and unconvincing. Nevertheless, if you look on WSJ or other sites that have analyst ratings, the consensus is far from the picture of impending collapse that's constantly portrayed in this thread. The analyst ratings on TSLA right now on WSJ are 10 buys, 9 holds, and 8 sells. I don't know what analysts they're polling, but I assume they're legit analysts from GS, Merrill Lynch, etc. And if so, they obviously have all the same access to reports of cars sitting in lots, and Musk's tweets, and bonds coming due, and productions estimates, and accounting fishiness that everyone here does, so why do most experts still think the stock is going up?

Who cares? Are you suggesting analyst ratings are meaningful?

Also not to nitpick but, it’s not most “experts” it’s most “analysts shown on WSJ”

I would guess they're probably meaningful and predictive, but I've never tracked them.

Again, I don't know who these analysts that constitute their panel are, but if the guy at Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch who is the nominal analyst for TSLA isn't an expert on the stock, I don't know who would qualify as an expert. How many experts do you think there are on this stock, and who do you think they are? (Is Tooth an expert in your eyes?)

To reiterate my question: Why is the opinion of analysts from big institutions or at least hedge funds so at odds with that of the vast majority of the posters in this thread? To the people holding Jan 2020 200 puts, tell me why you aren't worried that most analysts (who have at least all the info that you have) think this stock is headed up.

Those analysts are not really being paid for being honest. They either make money by selling research and thus trades with the bank or they make money from market placements.

The ratio between buy and sell seems to be unusually balanced, although I don't have done any comparisons.

I would also agree on the fact that they are not experts.

Good god no. Near term bankruptcy wasn't in play until it appeared they couldn't raise last year. And Musk himself said they were weeks away from dying in 2017 and implied that only the tent saved him. He's either a stone cold pathological liar (possible, not good for the "no fraud" case) or he was telling the truth and the bears were dead on the money.
That's actually extremely bearish for Wall Street. Let me give you an example. Do you remember Valeant? A dodgy pharmaceutical company that was committing (obvious, with hindsight) accounting fraud. It was the darling of Wall Street. 80% buy ratings (kicking the **** out of Tesla, right?) as it peaked at $250 before plunging down to $100 and then $12. The business model was never even close to viable - rapid acquisitions to grow revenue and price raises. The accounting was suspect. It was massively overvalued even in the best case. Yet analysts were 80% buy. Have a read of this. You might find it enlightening.

Valeant at 80% buy shows how hard skepticism is for Wall Street

Then there's Enron, of course. Expert analysis gave you this:

Enron Analysts: We Was Duped

Analysts are worthless human being who can't spot even obvious fraud and should be completely ignored. Want another example? Subprime mortgages. All of Wall Street participated in holding and recommending to their clients toxic worthless debt that was rated at AAA despite it consisting of nothing but mortgages to people people with the worst credit who could never pay it back.

On Tesla their earnings projections have been comical for years. If you look at graphs of projected vs actual earnings, they're stunningly wrong year after year, far too bullish, projecting big wins two years out that are massive losses by the time the date comes. I posted the graph a way above. How do they understand the first thing about the business if they get that so wrong?

The modus operandi of analysts is to love revenue growth. As long as revenue is growing, nothing else matters, not fraud, not lies, not lack of profitability. Tesla has this in common with Enron and Valeant.

Really quality video of the China GF (wink)

I can’t validate the date it was taken but this isn’t the first one to surface.

https://twitter.com/shanghaijayin/st...982127104?s=21