Tesla rally leaves short sellers down $3 billion since 2018

[Mr. Sparkle]

Source: Reuters



SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Tesla Inc’s (TSLA.O) short sellers have suffered $3 billion in losses since the end of 2018, including a $500 million hit on Friday after the electric carmaker’s quarterly deliveries beat investors’ expectations and drove its stock to a record high.

Traders shorting Tesla have lost about $900 million in just the first two trading days of 2020, adding to mark-to-market losses of $2.9 billion last year, according to S3 Partners, a financial analytics firm. Tesla said on Friday it delivered 112,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter, beating expectations of 104,960 vehicles, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. It delivered approximately 367,500 vehicles during all of 2019, just meeting the low end of its target to deliver 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles.

That report pushed Tesla’s stock up 3.7% to $446.21, bringing its gain in the past three months to about 90% in a rally fueled by a surprise third quarter profit and signs of progress ramping up production at the company’s new factory in China. Tesla on Friday said it demonstrated a production run-rate capability of more than 3,000 units per week at the Shanghai factory.

Read more: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-deliveries-shorts/tesla-rally-leaves-short-sellers-down-3-billion-since-2018-idUSKBN1Z21W1

[The Mouth]

1. GOOD- Short sellers suck

Take that negative shit and shove it.

[kysrsoze]

3. Many of these assholes were actively spreading disinformation about the company. Serves them right.

They got what they deserved.

You'd think people would cheer an innovative American company which built itself from the ground up in and disrupted an industry that's extremely difficult to even enter. Instead, many look at it as a threat against supposed great 'Murican companies that shove lackluster, derivative cars down everyone's throats and support the fossil fuel industry that is destroying our planet.

[Miguelito Loveless]

2. Could not happen to a nicer bunch of slime

But the oil industry has a lot of money to burn:

http://evtv.me/2019/08/the-tesla-conspiracy-or-am-i-a-dead-whistleblower/

Despite the title, the writer is a car guy, and not a CT monger. He lays out his evidence quite logically and saliently.

[paulkienitz]

7. so logically and saliently that I could hardly figure out what he was allegating

[Miguelito Loveless]

10. Okay, so let me try.

There has been a MASSIVE amount of short interest in Tesla stock from the very beginning, but it has intensified in the last few years (since 2015). It is now one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street. Given how much money people have lost shorting the stock (about $8 billion so far, $2.9 billion in 2019, $300+ million in the last two days) there are still large blocks of short sellers holding their position despite devastating losses. This doesn't make sense unless you have money to burn sustaining the position against margin calls (oh, and the interest on the borrowed shares). A person truly interested in simply making money would have reversed from short to long quite a while ago, and made a killing riding the stock up.

This begs the question of who has the kind of money that makes an $8 billion loss insignificant and the only logical answer is: Big Oil.

Given the existential threat posed by EVs to their profits, destroying Tesla by convincing people Musk is a fraud and Tesla is a Ponzi scheme, $8 billion is cheap, and they have plenty of money to burn. Also, we have seen coordinated efforts on social media (fake accounts, sock puppets, astroturf groups funded by the Koch Brothers, bot accounts, false stories, etc) to discredit EVs in general and Tesla specifically

An argument could also be made that the big players are fronting for smaller players, who individually can't lose that kind of money, but collectively could. The list of industries that see their profits seriously threatened by EVs in general, and again, Tesla specifically, is pretty long:

Oil
Coal
Natural Gas
Frackers
Electric Utilities
Auto Insurance
Legacy Automakers
Auto parts makers
Auto mechanics and body shops
Truck/taxi/bus drivers

EVs in general, and Tesla specifically, are poised to do to these industries what Apple did to Nokia and Motorola, what PCs did to mainframes, what email did to FAX machines, what cell phones did to land lines, and what music streaming did to music CDs.

When you look at the fact that Trillions of annual profits are at risk, billions over five years is insignificant.

Looking at the energy industry alone, these folks are literally burning the planet and its resources, while killing millions of people with the pollution and climate damage. So, they REALLY do not want people to truly understand that we not only have the tech to solve a lot of our energy problems NOW, but that it is cheaper and orders of magnitude less toxic.

Oh, and renewable. If you run a coal fired generator, and pay to have big heavy pieces of dirty, filthy coal shipped by rail to your facility by the megaton, a competing plant that gets clean, free fuel delivered for free, is hard on the P&L statement.

If I have still managed to make the explanation obtuse, then watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and follow the plot line about the destruction of street cars.

[paulkienitz]

11. it would be so much easier to just sell your own electric car

The barriers to competing to Tesla are high, but not all that high. For one thing, they freely license their in-house technology. Lots of car companies are coming out with their own electric models, and as far as I've seen, many of them are reasonably competitive with Tesla, and it would not be all that difficult for them to achieve comparable sales with a generation or two of incremental improvements. Tesla has some advantages but in the end they're not all that large. Their most vaunted technological leap forward is their self-driving software, and in that area they're actually behind some other companies now. I just can't buy the premise that Tesla is somehow this unique golden super-company that threatens to take over the whole market while other companies flop around like beached fish. There's no way that electric cars can get up to, say, ten percent of the market without Tesla losing a lot of market share to other car companies, competing with very similar prices and quality -- in fact, possibly underpricing them because Tesla tries to build cars that will have a longer lifespan than most companies attempt.

I think electric cars will really start selling big once they manage to push battery energy density to about twice what it is now. This will enable 600 miles on a charge, enough for a full day's drive on a road trip. That way you can drive it just like a gas car until you stop for the night. By the time they achieve that they'll probably also have dendrite-resistant electrolytes, which are pretty far along already, which would make it much easier for a battery pack to last ten or twenty years.

[ffr]

4. Let the be the beginning of the end to doubts about Tesla

And never forget, Tesla has the world's only supercharging network already in place. Buy a Tesla and nothing is preventing you from seeing the world.

Great news!

[NBachers]

5. Go place wagers on your mother's death, you fucks.

[TeamPooka]

6. everyone hates short sellers. just like 'don't" bettors at a craps table.

[TXPaganBanker]

8. That's an odd way to say the company is doing well.

"Tesla’s stock [is] up 3.7% to $446.21, bringing its gain in the past three months to about 90% in a rally fueled by a surprise third quarter profit and signs of progress ramping up production at the company’s new factory in China."

"The gains in Tesla’s shares have elevated its market capitalization to $80 billion, compared to GM’s market value of $52 billion and Ford’s market capitalization of $37 billion. "

Writing with slant much?

[Quemado]

9. $3 billion is a drop in the bucket for the fossil fuel industry.

$3 billion is less than one day's worth of oil sales.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

12. My hemorrhoids bleed for them. n/t