A 'cohort' of new buyers is the biggest risk to the short here. I would love to see where it will come from. Against it:

-Car sales are already entering into cyclical weakness, a headwind out of the gate

-Reliability issues getting more coverage, front page stories don't really hint at edge cases of frustration but openly call out parts/service delays. Actual reliability in terms of outlier distance from mainstream makes is close to 80's Yugo vs Honda/GM at the time. This doesn't have to continue for long (it's only getting worse) until Tesla can become a late night talk show punchline.

-FIT will drop *again* just as this cohort would be coming around. Even at a small halvening the effect has proven to be strong, so best case they get a 2 month of more demand until it is cut down again

-Auction results on Tesla have been sinking hard. A model S isn't something to be owned out of warranty, there are stats floating around where 60% of drivtrains require major replacement/service by 60k+ miles. People just hate these kind of costs even if they should rationally be treated as TCO instead of one-offs. Even Ferrari owners with unlimited cash line up to buy warranties so they don't have to 'pay' for expensive repairs. This suggests low residuals and is going to make a lease program very tough. People want payments under $500 a month for mainstream demand, almost no way to get to these numbers now.

-Random seeming price cuts and the promise to continue until the '35k' car arrive are only training people to wait.

-Deep sales staff cuts means no one to hit the pavement/phones and press for trades.

-S/X are only getting older. Promise of Y is required to pump the stock, yet works to limit demand as crossover buyers are implicitly encouraged to wait.

-Measurable indicators of word of mouth are hard gauge. Tesla has had an enormous amount of coverage so there is limited scope for people to discover the brand.

-Referral program axed, less incentive for current owners to drive sales to their friends


All of these are pretty much either out of Tesla hands or impossible choices for them where they can't win either way.

Compare it to the Nasdaq recently - it is burning down. All the tech algos and basket trades are not enough to prop it up anymore.

What was it doing as tech was lagging to end the year last year? It trades in its own world, yes the market helps when it keeps going higher but good luck taking anything long term from a two month period of underperfomance. It doesn't matter because I can compare it to auto stocks and the indices longer term and it looks like a great investment up to now on a relative basis.

I bought a $295 put when the Consumer Report news broke.

Leggoooo

The day Trump was elected TSLA was in the $190s and 6 months later it had doubled. I have to remind myself this when I look at all the various relative performance because it's a mess. You can cherry pick plenty of different time frames whatever your narrative is.

I get it about picking timeframes. It seems the disconnect is pretty significant from earlier this year. Maybe I'm wrong and it will outperform Nasdaq in the next few months and ramp back to 340 (still in the trading range). But the relative performance helps take the "noise" out of the market so to speak. And yes the slow bleed fits my narrative, mea culpa, I'm enjoying it haha.

Cars are ****. Demand is ****. Musk is a liar and a fraud. And now we find from reliable sources just out that they treat their customers like ****, not providing refunds for a long time (either because they're completely incompetent or to keep cash inflated):

Tesla customers describe maddening problems with returns and refunds
Bears are right on the facts as always. And Musk is of course the piece of crap conman we paint him as.

Step 1: Make a **** quality car in a tent using 1980s technology after promising an "alien dreadnought" with "air friction limited robots" where you'd need "strobe lights to see it" while promising quality "10x" better than others.

Step 2: Deliver this **** car to someone who finds it so awful they need to return it.

Step 3: Wait months to refund their money while Tesla keeps their trade-in car and their cash, helping to keep cash inflated on their balance sheet, while this person is stranded without a car and money.

Elon Musk: not a conman.

I LOL’d for real at the $1,000 refund check that bounced.

Dear God.

Is it possible for this thing to gap down like Stamps on a trash demand report?

-Ships are being loaded with 1-1.5k cars only on the way to EU

-US demand when adding up observed sales rates seems impossibly low, even if all the Q counters are off by 50% (unlikely given methodology and verified cross references) the numbers will still kill it

-China demand is meaningless, a few K cars


My guess for the stock was the stickiness of 300, etc would have it just trend down slowly barring non-fundamental events. If these numbers come out what ideas are people having from a trading point of view if it collapses to the 200 range in a few days?

Slow bleed. The demand news is out, expectations were set on the last call for a bad Q1, so just about anything can be explained away.

There really are only 3 things that could lead to a gap down like Stamps - Elon leaving, federal criminal charges, or missing the bond payment in March.

I don't see any of those happening. The rest of the news, no matter how 'bad' it may seem: delivery numbers, guys killed by autopilot, people complaining on twitter, pics of idle delivery centers, just about anything else, will not cause a gap down.

And yeah, tsla outperformed nasdaq today, RIP my narrative! But slow bleed still looks most likely.

Demand news isn't "out". You're not thinking about this clearly at all. If you asked most potential or current Tesla investors what demand for the Model 3 is like, they'd say it's off the charts and that Tesla are supply limited. Narratives don't change overnight. Maybe they'll know that January was slow, but that's "expected".

You're completely wrong on this. Tesla has lost almost 10% in a ripping market. How much would it have lost in a sideways or down market? There are maybe 10 things not on your list that would cause a big gap down. I mean, they have, recently! $420 funding secured, his crying NYT interview, to name just a few. Increasing confirmation of demand death will cause far more carnage than those things did. InsideEV February numbers will come out, then March. Profit or projection warnings might need to be given. They might need to release highly damaging MNPI to raise in order to survive. SEC might reopen case. Judge might review it in light of Musk's complete non-compliance recently. Musk might flip out again as he sees he noose tightening with demand going nowhere. Investigative reporters could break fraud news like they did with Theranos or Valeant or Enron. Lots and lots of things could cause major moves down.

Odds on Musk slipping up before stock price reflects demand “death”?

TS - none of those things would cause a Stamps-like gap down. The SEC case is civil, not criminal. And sure a warning for Q1 (even though he gave one on Q4 call) might cause a 10% tank, but nothing like stamps. It would probably need to be one of the 3 things I mentioned. Oh, I left out elon dying in an autopilot accident, or a meteor hitting his plane in flight. Ok fine.

Nothing tesla says or does has me questioning my bear thesis, but the fact that you, TS, are on the same side, that has me questioning it. Scary.

If you're talking about a 50% overnight gap-down, even the things you listed wouldn't do that. Stamps was a $3 billion company. This is a $50 billion company.

Again, your reasoning is just horrible, and you're wrong about what the market knows and has priced in and what it would react to.

I was rereading the Q4 letter this morning amd noticed something interesting. The letter guided S/X deliveries to slightly below Q1 '18. Not Q4 but Q1.

Q1 '18 S/X deliveries were less than 22k. If they are admitting a Q/Q drop of 20%+ how bad will it really be? 50%? More?

Also strangely they discussed demand pull forward as a cause of lower deliveries in Q1 but only for S/X. For the 3 they said deliveries might be 10k lower than production (why can't compare to actual number? what will production be?) due to shipping to EU/China.

Desperately attempting to maintain narrative of huge backlog of reservations and demand for the 3?

Every single person who bought a Tesla based on bull**** safety claims should be returning their deathtrap tomorrow for an Elon guaranteed full refund. But they won't because they are delusional. More people will die.

https://twitter.com/bluemistmiami/st...119828480?s=19

lol he hit a tree head on traveling at a high rate of speed swerving through traffic.

why, Teslas can't even save drivers when they hit a tree head on at 90 miles an hour. WHAT A DEATHTRAP

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/b...225-story.html

The issue of whether Tesla drivers are douchebags (they are) is separate to whether the cars act properly in a crash. Airbags should deflate after inflating so the occupant isn't pinned. Door handles should release or at least have a manual workaround if they're flush so people can exit. Otherwise they burn to death, as just demonstrated in the real world. This is really the most basic safety stuff.

Similarly, "autopilot" when touted as "safer than a human driver" should notice a giant truck across the motorway, and not pass under it, decapitating the driver while the car careens on like a headless chook, its automatic braking failing to work as well as it travels almost a half mile across fields before slamming into a power pole.

Similarly, autopilot shouldn't slam into concrete dividers on a highway, pulverizing the programmer inside, just because the lines disappeared.

Similarly, autopilot shouldn't reliably slam into parked fire trucks reliably after being sold as "autopilot"

These are basic safety features that non-cucks are able to implement in their cars. This **** ain't hard, bro. Stop drinking the koolaid. Almost literally in the case of some of these drivers - they believe the conman cult leader on the abilities of the horribly unsafe "autopilot" and end up decapitated, burnt and pulverized.

The autopilot specifically isn't designed to detect and avoid stationary objects on a freeway. Just like other lane keeping/adaptive cruise controls on the market. It's right in the manual.

Detecting and avoiding a stationary object on the freeway is a feature not a bug? Cool!

It's not really an Autopilot, that's just the name. Everyone should realize that AUTOPILOT is just a marketing gimmick. Read the manual.

Right, it's not like an aircraft autopilot, the Tesla autopilot requires an alert operator at all times to address situations that the autopilot is not designed for or capable of carrying out.

Wait, hold on, never mind, that's exactly the same situation as an aircraft autopilot. Huh.

Who wouldn't want such a safe and reliable automobile? QA all day.

Aircraft autopilot also isn't that sophisticated.

If anything, that crash should be a reminder that life is too short to spend a lot of it obsessing over a car company's stock price.