Anatomy of a Bubble - Tesla and Bitcoin
- 2020-09-02 07:59:00
UK 11:32 Sunday, 4 October 2026
Breaking news and expert analysis on fast-moving AIM and LSE listed shares
On Wednesday evening Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) passed another important milestone on the road to bankruptcy by showing that even with record deliveries of 95,000 vehicles in Q2 it is incapable of making money. Having promised in Q3 last year that the company would be profitable from now on-in and not require further funding, having raised $2.4 billion in May, it has now racked up losses of $1.3 billion in the first six months of the year. The departure of the last remaining grown up, co-founder JB Straubel, who has been selling stock all year, is also cause for grave concern...
A week ago I emerged blurry eyed at Heathrow off an overnight from San Francisco. Actually, I say overnight but in reality with the time difference it was more like I lost a full day. I guess I gained it all on the way there... Anyhow I had been lurking in Silicon Valley for a few days, meeting a few people and customers in order to try to get a handle on things. Yes, i was almost back to my old professional fund manager mindset.
On a recent podcast, @TeslaCharts, a prominent and distinguished member of the Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) bear community on twitter known as $TSLAQ, described the ingredients needed for the Tesla phenomenon as the Barbershop Quartet, which I thought aptly describes not just Tesla but the investment climate which we have, until recently, taken for granted...
I have spoken about Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) at the last two UK Investor Shows and written about it extensively as a once in a generation short opportunity. Given that it is probably the most covered and talked about stock in the world, I do not propose to continue writing about it for a while but do make the following observations after its Q1 release on Wednesday…
The horrendous Q1 delivery numbers from Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) should have finally buried the growth story for all but the die hard believers and the focus now should move on to when it has to raise capital or file for bankruptcy…
I speculated previously about what might be the catalyst for the great Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) unravel and since then I believe we may have seen it...
The resilience of the Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) share price in the weeks since its Q4 earnings release is nothing short of astonishing...
The year to date has not provided a very promising backdrop for bears. I - like many others - am intensely irritated by Donald Trump’s obsession with the level of the US market and his clearly seeing it as a barometer for his own genius. When he claimed late last year that the fourth quarter sell off was a blip and a buying opportunity I waited with grim satisfaction for the rude awakening that was sure to follow...
As an, uneventful by recent standards, Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) quarterly earnings call came to an end last night, Elon Musk came up with the following, as if it were an afterthought; “Um yeah…the um….Deepak is going to be retiring from Tesla”...
In the old days ( i.e only three years ago) the BBC pension fund was invested, as it should have been in safe dividend plays like BP, Shell and BAT Industries. But that sort of portfolio played badly with the uber politically correct state funded broadcaster. So its all change. The new top 20 holdings as at 31 March 2018 are below.
Most material on twitter is unadulterated junk. But there is the odd gem. In the case of Tesla (TSLA) where the sell side analysts are all paid bulls, some of the best insight is on twitter. Like Lucian Miers, I regard this company as an accident, no an outright car crash, just waiting to happen. In that vein I bring you a most instructive series of tweets yesterday from @Polixines13 who knows his or her onions.
My 2018 bear tip at the UK investor show was Tesla so apologies for that. It is ,however, rather looking like the ten year bull market may be coming to an end and stocks that are vulnerable are over leveraged names with refinancings coming due and crazy valuations. So I am going to stick my neck out and predict that 2019 is the year that Musk finally gets his comeuppance. The shares are now $317.
The recent market turmoil has seen some decent gains for those who have been predominantly bearish for a while in the face of an unprecedented bull market. Buying the dips, a wildly successful strategy for the last ten years, suddenly doesn’t feel so clever. My own view as to whether this time might be different was to look at the world’s favourite stock Apple (NASDAQ - AAPL) and see if it would lose its trillion-dollar market cap and then some. That to me would be a signal that the selloff has legs. That has now happened, and I believe that the long overdue reality check has started and is by no means over.
It’s looking increasingly like Elon Musk’s go private “funding secured” tweet on the 7th August has backfired horribly as Tesla (NASDAQ - TSLA) now trades $40 below the prevailing price before he sent it. I was recently accused of confirmation bias on Tesla, i.e. of looking only at the bear case and ignoring the positives but it is difficult post-tweet to find any bullish case that holds water.
As I write, Tesla (US - TSLA) at $305 has regained the level at which it was trading on Thursday when Musk lost the plot on the Q1 conference call, causing the price to drop 7% in minutes.
I am not a great fan of shorting crazy valuations on the basis that they tend to get crazier. For this reason, I have not been short the likes of Fevertree (FEVR) or Purplebricks (PURP), as calling the top is well-nigh impossible.
I was going to have my usual weekend dig at one of the many over-promoted pieces of crap on the lower reaches of AIM but thought instead I should lift up my head and look further afield and take a pop at most over-promoted stock in the global markets with a proper superhero at the helm, namely Tesla Motors (NSDQ: TSLA) and the irrepressible Elon Musk.
