Investing in Tesla General Discussion Thread

MitchJi

10 MW
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Jun 2, 2008
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Marin County California
Hi,

EDIT:
Changed the title and the focus of this thread, from my personal investment in Tesla, to a discussion of investing in Tesla in general. Any related information is welcome. I started that by adding these posts:
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=68961&start=25#p1048825

This post was added earlier (related information post)
http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=68961&start=25#p1044915


I am about to pull the trigger on a 5 figure Tesla Stock purchase, about 20 percent of our savings. I am also tentatively planning to use about $1k to to lock up some stock with call options, because I believe the Stock will rise substantially after they introduce the Model X. I think that will happen in two phases.
1. They actually start producing cars.
2. People discover that it is a superior car.

My reasoning:
IMO the biggest risk, and also a potentially huge benefit is the Gigafactory. There is a very good chance that Tesla will end up with a supply of excellent cells, at an unbeatable price.

The potential risk IMO is that if sometime in the next 6-24 months develops a superior solid state battery cell. There are several companies that claim they are getting close. A major reason I think that solid state battery cells pose a risk is that they use a completely different manufacturing process.

But even if the worst case scenario happens I think that Tesla will do well (eventually), because I think that Tesla-Elon will produce superior cars. Compared to the Leaf and Volt-Bolt buying a Model 3 will be IMO a no-brainer.

Any intelligent input on the Gigafactory or the timing of the Model X launch would be appreciated.
 
are you asking for advice or did you already purchase these shares?

i use the <full stochastics> from stockcharts.com to determine trend changes. watch for the point where the fast line will cross over the slowline to confirm the trend has changed.

i think the EV market is being gouged out by cheap gas but mostly the Tesla sales are into a distinct sector which may become saturated and often has fickle buyers who are just as likely to go for some other image promoting exclusive high end car.
 
To what extent is the current price of Tesla discounting the most miraculous possible future imaginable. These are the questions you need to answer in this pimped out over-extended bull market which tends to "mark to fiction" most financial assets in general after the tailwinds of the Fed's endless money printing removes all possibility of traditional price discovery. PE ratios of nigh infinite are very common these days. Buyer beware if the SHTF and the punchbowl is removed. Just sayin'. There's a lot of great companies out there with potentially shitty stock performance for the foreseeable future given the asinine ratios.
 
Yeah, Apple DOES usually plunge when it's at $4 adjusted. With an IPO at $22 that had grown to $28.75 before the public could even buy, Apple created nearly 400 millionaires its' first day. And onwards over $50 until the eve of the expected release of Windows 94, which of course became Windows 95 instead. It got a bit dicey once the release finally came and it dipped its' toe into the sub $15 waters in late 1997, but it was certainly making good on the things that were being said about it that were so like the earlier post here, having dropped to less than a third of its' value 4 years earlier.

My one problem with your Tesla investment is that that's a huge chunk of your portfolio on one stock that's considered overbought. Much as has been Apple over the years, there's an apt comparison. In the last 10 years Apple has had some roller coaster rides, but if you hang onto it it'll come back. But Tesla doesn't have marketshare the way Apple does. I sort of wonder if the call play isn't the better idea, but I don't know your real plan. You can make 5 times your initial investment in a stock if it doubles in price. This being by only riding the roller coaster UP. You buy at $10, ride to $15 and sell before it plunges, buy it back at $10-11, etc. This used to be really good to me with Invidia, which kept moving back and forth from $9 to $27 and back to $9. There was no buy and hold in my plan.
 
MitchJi said:
I am about to pull the trigger on a 6 figure Tesla Stock purchase, about 20 percent of our savings.

There's lots to discuss about buying Tesla stock generally, but since you've framed your post in terms of spending a considerable chunk of your wealth on one stock it makes me wonder if the purchase is an amount you can afford to lose?

It depends on your situation and how risk adverse you are. I would describe spending 20% of your savings on one stock as a high risk investment (no matter what company's stock you purchased).

Lets say you're 40 years old, you plan to work the for the next 25 years and are thinking of spending $100k of your $500k savings. In this situation I would say that although the risk is high, even if the TSLA stock dropped to zero and didn't recover, you still have a great chance of saving enough money for a comfortable retirement.

Or if you're 60yrs old, spending $500k of your $2.5M savings on TSLA stock you might also be able to afford to take a punt.

But, the older you are and the less savings you have, the more caution should be exercised.

Like you, I think the TSLA stock is likely to be a good investment if bought and held at least till Model X is being delivered and perhaps farther out to Model 3. But although I'm in my early 30s, I wouldn't consider putting more than 10% of my savings into a single stock (TSLA or otherwise).
 
I would only sink that much money (100%) into TESLA if I thought they were significantly under valued at the time of purchase. Which I don't believe right now. Tesla is doing well and many people keeping the price aloft. I think you stand a better chance in the market if you just plop that money into an indexed fund. Or at least a large portion and put the rest into Tesla. If they take a dip at some point, consider buying it then.
 
$2.50 gas with no end in sight as long as the gummit wants to bash Russia into some form of submission...

speedmd quoted the right article. There IS a market for utility power system load shedding, peaking and night/day load shifting. If Tesla focuses there, they may be a significant player. They are going to have to find some use for the megaFactory cells.
 
Personally I'm a fan of simple index fund investing. It's not exciting, but it's a relatively safe way to invest and I've personally made quite a bit of money that way (pretty much anyone who has had money broadly invested in the stock market over the last 5 years has too). If you have done some analysis of Tesla and determined that it's a good buy right now or has good potential for growth, then by all means go for it. If it's just because Tesla makes a sexy car, has a lot of media buzz, and you believe that electric vehicles will soon replace gas ones... Then ask what others have asked, can you afford to lose a good chunk of the money. No one company is a sure bet. Sure Apple has done well over the last 10-15 years, but plenty of companies have not. What has done well, and I think history supports the idea that it will continue to do well, is the overall stock market. Buying lots of companies via something like a S&P500 index fund or a total market index fund is a far safer bet. Personally I have the majority of my non 401k holdings in a low cost Vanguard fund, VTSAX.

This article may be helpful in the process: http://jlcollinsnh.com/2011/06/02/why-i-cant-pick-winning-stocks-and-you-cant-either/
 
A post or so above, I mentioned about Tesla getting into power grid stabilization and day/night load shifting. Just today I read an article of Tesla introducing a residential unit that appears to do just that. This could be a game changer, and the place where all those cells can go. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2015/05/01/tesla-ceo-unveils-home-battery-system/?intcmp=latestnews

I read a year or so ago that a Texas utility was giving HUGE incentives to it's customers to use nightime power and shift it to daytime.

Musk is providing more technical innovation than 25 years of DOE programs! Competitive corporate is way more efficient with capital than the government...
 
The entire stock market is teetering on the brink of a crash in my opinion. The economy is heading back into a recession, and the Federal Reserve is still stimulating with 0% interest rates. Now is a very bad time to buy stocks.

Here are some articles for my rationale.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-...-record-valuations-reminds-what-happened-2007

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-01/five-charts-showing-us-back-recession


Right now there are only a few safe long term investments:

1. Build up cash in small banks
2. Buy gold, silver, land
3. Invest in yourself. Learn a new skill.

$
 
Hi,

http://fortune.com/2015/05/01/tesla-energy-reveal/
Musk also introduced Tesla’s Powerpack a scalable energy storage unit for heavy industrial and utility applications. The Powerpack will be sold in 100 kWh units and can be scaled up into multi gigawatt-hour class. The power packs are priced a $250 a kilowatt hour, Musk said.
That means that Tesla's can make a profit now selling packs for $250 per kWh. When the gigafactory starts producing cells their cost will fall to $125-$175 per kWh. That's cheaper than Lead!

Most of the analysts are missing the fact that this is great news for their Model III.

It also probably means Tesla will be very hard to compete with in the energy storage market, because who else can get cells for gigafactory prices?
 
I wish I could buy US shares but currency differences make it more tricky.
I think the core start to the elimination test for me buying shares would to just look at the market cap of Tesla and its last annual net profit.
If you can post those to the forum and still say you want to buy Tesla then fine, but it looks to me that if the market sentiment goes down then Tesla has a long way to fall before more skeptical buyers would step in.
I just can't help but think something is going to come along and give the US markets a good shake with in the next 6 months and you will then be up for a better price to buy.

I think things like the announcement of the home power storage systems etc says Elon has made Tesla hit its peak.
 
TheBeastie said:
Tesla and its last annual net profit.

IIRC Tesla Motors has never turned an annual profit.

The analysts seem sceptical: The sales push is China appears to have flopped. They cannot seem to replicate the success in California anywhere else.

The company may turn out a Global success but it's far from a safe bet at this point, IMO :)
 
Punx0r said:
TheBeastie said:
Tesla and its last annual net profit.

IIRC Tesla Motors has never turned an annual profit.

The analysts seem sceptical: The sales push is China appears to have flopped. They cannot seem to replicate the success in California anywhere else.

The company may turn out a Global success but it's far from a safe bet at this point, IMO :)
It still has an actual net profit number, it's a - minus number into the hundreds of millions but I would still like the op to post it along side the market cap as a kind of psychological test ( a bit like how people physically write down their goals ) to see if he has anything to say about the matter, or still feels the same.
 
After my many years of experience and intensive study concerning the stock market, I have discovered that: The best way to end up with a million dollars in the stock market is...to start out with two million. (its an old joke, but I couldn't resist). I did well with Ford stock at one point, but there were other attempts at investments that ended in losses. I ended up with a modest profit (after lots of risk), cashed in, haven't gone back...too many scars.

The potential risk IMO is that if sometime in the next 6-24 months develops a superior solid state battery cell

IMHO, solid state batteries are so desirable for a mobile vehicle, I believe they WILL come, and blank checks will be issued to any entity that can solve whatever problems crop up along the way. That being said...

The Gigafactory making 18650's and the new 20700's will have most of those cells go into EV and hybrid packs for several years, but...even after solid state batteries start coming online, I am of the opinion that the recent announcement of the "power wall" device is where there will be an ongoing need for the Gigafactory cells. I believe this will be because of the near impossibility of coal-burning electrical generating plants inability to expand existing plants, or build new ones. This is a long-range payoff play, but it is exactly the type of investment that made Buffet a billionaire.

You can't just turn off a coal-burning plant at night, and then power it up when all of the air-conditioners come on in the summer noon. This is why many places have cheaper electricity at night, to encourage people to charge up their EV at night, when the plants are at an idling speed. I have read of it called "time shifting the load". The social model to make this happen will be similar to the German model.

Clearly if you own a Tesla (or any one of the EVs available), it would be nice to plug that large battery pack into a home inverter to keep the power on during a blackout (maybe not the air-conditioner, but the fridge, the TV, computer, cell-phone charger, etc). However, that particular convenience is only icing on the cake, the real meat of this scenario is having Tesla power-walls tied to the grid. Hundreds of thousands of Tesla power-walls would charge up in the middle of the night, and then they can knock the peaks off of power surges during the daytime. "Smart meters" are being installed in California, which give the homeowner a small discount on their electricity, in exchange for the state having the right to turn off your air-conditioner for a couple hours when the coal-burning electricity-generating plants are maxed out.

Why would a home-owner want to allow one of these to be added to their garage? tax credits..plus its somewhat desirable to know your home has power when the grid temporarily goes down. It is especially desirable if the whole deal is structured so that the home-owner has very little out-of-pocket expenses for the install. If that system is deemed to be successful, I suspect the next phase will be a gradual roll-out of state-sponsored solar-PV panels being mounted on the roof of any power-wall home that is interested. Solar power would charge the power-walls when it's sunny, which further reduces any coal-burning that might be needed.

I'm not saying that I think the Gigafactory will be working overtime, but...I also don't think they will be idle. I am certain they will stay busy making and selling as many cells as they can. I can envision solid-state batteries taking over vehicles, where weight and bulk are a critical parameter, but for the "power wall", the 18650/20700's should continue to be used until something cheaper per kW comes along.
 
How solid is your employment position? Will you still have a job in a deep resesion? Could you sleep at night if Tesla drops to $87.00 per share?

These are the things you should be thinking about.

But here is a little story: I once bought 3000 shares of Apple at just under $13.00 per share. (I think it was about $12.87 per).

As time went on Apple split 2-1 so that 3000 shares were now 6000 shares. Then they split 7-1 which made 42000 shares. So today, if you count the "after hours" trading Apple is worth $129.05 or more then $5,400,000.00 for those 42000 shares.

So am I a millionaire?.....No. Even before the 2-1 stock split I sold my shares, at a fine profit and invested in myself. I made a couple of movies that were never quite finished and never could sell. So I lost it all..... :cry:

Moral of the story is if you want to make money on stocks, and you think Tesla is the stock for you, BE PREPARED TO HOLD ON TO THE STOCK FOR A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER OF YEARS....Even if times get bad.

:D
 
Chevy's 2016 Volt costs just $25,000 if you live in California
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/03/chevy-2016-volt-pricing/
I wonder if headlines like these can put fear in Teslas share price?
 
TheBeastie said:
.......
I wonder if headlines like these can put fear in Teslas share price?

I think with Tesla diversifying an inexpensive Volt won't have an impact.
 
TheBeastie said:
Chevy's 2016 Volt costs just $25,000 if you live in California
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/03/chevy-2016-volt-pricing/
I wonder if headlines like these can put fear in Teslas share price?


Nothing the Volt does is going to impact Tesla sales... The Volt is like a covered wagon in comparison, and still hauls around a tank of cancer-fluid on board.


When GM releases a real dedicated EV, it will be the first product with the potential to give GM future relevancy.
 
I'd like to have a Tesla and can afford one too. However the Tesla can't fulfill my needs and I can't/won't wait until it can. So...

It's a 2016 Volt for me. 50+ mile on battery and 400 total range for my road trips.

I remember coming back from a fun crazy long road :D trip to New Mexico with Luke where, while talking, he pooped all over the the idea of using a efficient little ICE engine to partially charge the battery. He keeped wanking on the fact of the 15% losses on all the different stages. 15% here and 15% there. No doubt that is true.

However.....

When the savings from using plugin electricity are figured in the inefficiency, it don't seem to mater as much. Producing your own homeowner solar as a power source for charging the car, makes even more sense.

It seems to matter more how many charging stations are available and being able charge in 15 minutes. Those times are coming, but they are just not here yet.

As B moose says.... "It's all about the system"
 
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