So over the past month the S&P 500 is down 1.7%

Over the past month TSLA is down 1.4%

VERY WEAK!!!

The data came out only a few days ago...Tesla has dived 7% since. Today it badly under performed the market and all tech stocks, losing 3% in a flat market. Before it could have been the market decline...today was something different, hence I posted.

If you think institutional holdings going from 67% to 57% (including some very well regarded long term players selling half their stake or more) isn't a big deal, I disagree. It's noteworthy news, as is the news that the bonds they recently released slipped badly.

By all means ignore it and take a whiff of your Musk butthole scent smelling salts to clear your mind and soothe your soul and gently shroud your eyes with hallucinative visions of rockets landing successfully, but it's worthwhile news.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/409...ldings-plummet
I see this happening with every investments that goes up a magnitude or six. For example I see a lot of my friends who bought ETH at the ICO selling now at 1000x profit. Not because they don't believe in ETH anymore, but because they now have 50-99% of their wealth in high risk investment which is more than the 1-5% of their net worth that they decided to risk at the ICO.

I would not over-interpret this data. Similar to previous discussion this information could increase the likelihood that they have lost faith, but it is not imo sufficient to draw the conclusion with a very high certainty as the space of other explanations are rather large.

Morgan Stanley and ETH ICO investors

Solid comparison

Of course, it matters when large institutional investors disinvest. The reasons are up for debate but the reality is that they are holding less of TSLA and think the price is worth cashing in on.

I think (and really hope) it's a sign of a general market downturn.

I don't agree it's a sign of anything larger, but why do u hope for an economic downturn?

Primarily a market downturn, not entirely sure if economy and market are strongly in sync anymore.

I stayed out of the market for a while now because I was dumb enough to think that it couldn't go higher.

What an odd comment.

Professional investors are selling. They're selling because it's way up and incredibly expensive. They're not selling because it's way down and cheap.

People like you who think high price good, buy high sell low are buying. Professional investors with the opposite philosophy are selling.

Couple of things. I'm not buying TSLA. I don't own any TSLA. I don't think that "high price is good, buy high sell low", although I don't know if TSLA is priced high or not. The only point I was making is that in the last month TSLA and the broader market have not had terribly different results, which seems like a reasonable thing to say...

Sure, but it doesn't say anything about the magnitude of how much they thought it was overvalued. The fact that the largest institutional investors are still retaining 50%ish of their holdings in the company suggests that they think the new price it's settled at is close to what it's worth.

You can't use their sale of stock as evidence of the underlying value without also accepting their willingness to retain at the current price to prove the same thing.

That's not how it works. These funds retain large holdings of all stocks for many reasons.

Such as?

Yes, this is a typical hot potato scenario. Look at price to book value. It insane. Tesla is overvalued due to the hype and that is it.

Market making, collateral for loans (Musk has hundreds of millions in loans against his stock, I think some with Morgan Stanley), client and brokerage services such as providing stock for shorting, arbitrage.

I agree it 's not the be all and end all, but the fact that some large and very well regarded long time Tesla holders and bulls have cut half or more or even entirely sold out their holdings at these highs is not exactly a vote of confidence in Tesla's share price future.

As Model 3 production increases I assume more people will own Tesla and more people become aware of Tesla and start to consider it as investment. I expect to see a lot more people people owning TSLA shares and the big holders holding less. Is this reasonable?

Expanding the customer base adds weakly bullish effect imo. Agree with you.

And if that's true it'll probably be because they fanboy consumers are willing to pay prices higher than what it's currently trading at.

The big ones on the list are holding 2 and 8 billion in stock to serve as a market maker? Why? They're never going to need that kind of volume. What does musks debt have to do with these other companies holding onto TSLA - you're suggesting that they don't want to dump it because they think he'll default? Why do they need to hold large volumes of stock to allow people to short?

Even you don't believe that any of these things are likely to have a significant influence on them holding onto billions of dollars of equity.

If they are holding despite thinking it's overvalued it's probably because they think the bubble of delusion is going t grow before it pops.

Well Price T Rowe for example is an enormous provider of investment vehicles, like Vanguard. Technology ETFs, target date funds, etc. That involves keeping billions on the books. They hold every stock there is in large quantities. So does Morgan Stanley.

Morgan Stanley for example are heavily underweight on Tesla after this sale. Here are their holdings:



After this latest mass dumping of Tesla stock, they own less than half the amount of Tesla compare to say, Energy Partners, in terms of percentage of company.

It's even more hilarious on say, Twitter. They own 4x more Twitter stock as a percentage of market cap than they do Tesla stock.



Morgan Stanley have gone extreme bearish on Tesla. It was and is of course an excellent and obvious sell at these highs (the mid to high 300s).
Your thinking is just wrong on this, I'm sorry.

Morgan Stanley only has about 30 billion under management in its mutual funds, including its fixed income funds. It's hard to say a 551 million position (looks like mostly unhedged so probably not for market making) small or suggestive of a bearish position. Less bullish than they used to be, maybe. But it could just be risk management of those funds not wanting Tesla to take up too much % of their assets managed.

TSLA did after all dramatically outperform the S&P 500 YTD/past 12 months. Some rebalancing, even if the managers of the funds remain bullish, was inevitable.

That list is all holdings and it's way way larger than $30 billion.

Again, MS hold 4x more Twitter - Twitter! - than TSLA after this recent culling of Tesla stock.

TSLA is a government-funded pump to attract millennials into the market. Whatever advantages they had with regard to technology are gone. It's just another ev in a few years, and then you'll be left with a bag full of roofing company.

MS' assets under management =/= MS's mutual funds' assets under management.

Even if they WERE the same, and it's proven in the link HE provided that they aren't, you wouldn't hold billions in assets that you think are greatly overvalued for the sake of diversifying, you'd buy something else in that space. You don't need to hold large volume to facilitate people shorting the stock.

Never mind that morgan stanley and price rowe retained 50%, you have fidelity holding onto 87% of their 8b worth of assets. Who cares if one of them owns a larger chunk of twitter? Maybe they're bullish on twitter. They also own a smaller percent of amazon than they do tesla, should we take that to mean that their 5b$ in holdings in amazon is just for the sake of making markets?

This is just comical guys.

Fidelity dropping 10% isn't bearish, I agree. The others dropping 50-100% of their holdings in a quarter is a negative and there's no other way to spin this.

The ones who sold 100%, yes. For the ones who sold 50%, if they sold at 380 and stopped selling when it hit 320... that gives you some insight into the valuation they arrived at.