I think Jack Rickard [EVTV Motor Verks] was right in his August, 2019 blog post: The Tesla Conspiracy…Or Am I a Dead Whistleblower?
https://youtu.be/Wv_XcxpRuTw [Hat tip to Zack & Jesse]
…but also that he was making a mistake three short weeks ago when he announced he would begin short selling Tesla.
Of course it’s easier to tell where a stock went in the past than it is to tell where it will go in the future, but today isn’t like other days. There are still some obstacles on the horizon, but the person who fails to buy TSLA stock this morning — being financially positioned to do so — is a fool.
This post will explain why.
Forget for a second that Jack has more or less conclusively shown (in August) that the overall fight here is both against fossil fuel and Big Auto and a fight on which the future habitability of the world to some degree hangs in the balance.
Forget that there are a few significant stumbling blocks (such as upcoming Solar City legal business and uncertain upcoming Tesla delivery reports) still on the horizon.
Forget even the entirely valid concerns I’ve begun vocalizing about Tesla service and overall system management dynamics — because those concerns are very long term concerns, and even though issues like those might constitute what amounts to a long term value cap, that cap is certainly NOT in place today.
It’s quite possible that TSLA stock vaults over $800 by Friday’s close, and if you’re a relatively small time investor, you do not want to stand in its way.
Perhaps none of this is news, but news from a second source sometimes encourages us to take it more seriously:
There’s already blood in the water, and found money is the easiest kind to keep right on betting. If you’re a small position TSLAQ you’d best get out while you still can. Reposition and continue your fight next week — prior to the next stumbling blocks — but get out of the burning building of TSLA short positions as fast as you possibly can. “He who fights and runs away…”
It isn’t going down today or tomorrow, it’s going up.
You should not be harboring any sort of delusions that hard core Tesla disciples — like Ross Gerber of Gerber Kawasaki — are planning on taking profits on a day like today, or even in the near future. Tesla advocates and long term stockholders in large part equate the future habitability of the planet with Tesla’s success, and even though I myself have some strong objections to the company’s approach, I tend to agree with them.
Our desires to rein in Elon Musk’s somewhat inflated ego and correspondingly reckless behavior are insufficient incentive to behave unwisely and bet houses or children’s college funds on.
The largest fraction of short interest is, without question, held by a handful of very large institutional investors who are on the wrong side of history. They have long relied on people like you to cobble bits of misinformation into a modestly coherent dialogue and subsequently conduct your financial business from a metaphorical telephone booth. Don’t let them use you TODAY.
Those guys aren’t pumping quarters like garden variety millionaires do. They’re buying the behaviors of newspapers, reporters, large scale media, and people to whom $10M is a lot of money. From the jacuzzis of their airplanes.
It’s actually quite possible that, should TSLA burn those short positions sufficiently today and tomorrow, the company can then leverage its newfound ‘winnings’ to address the obvious concerns many of us have. It might well use the breathing room it’s granted to shore itself up and start flying right. It might be that the risks it previously took were calculated well enough that now, with the help of the NHSTA and possibly the Feds, it can start with the straight and narrow.
But today isn’t the day to speculate on it one way or the other.
Like it or not, today is the day to escape the burning building. Pride isn’t worthwhile to assert today, nor are the concerning scraps of the puzzle we know about. This isn’t a football game. You need not expend the last of the quarters available to you merely because you’re fighting a good fight.
None of this means you can’t keep right on objecting to how the company is managed. None of it means you can’t find a better position from which to object later, either. Keep in mind that mouths and pocketbooks are not completely coupled in both directions:
Pocketbooks can serve to feed mouths but today isn’t a day where your mouth will feed your pocketbook. At least not where this particular topic is concerned.
There is some cause for concern about the company, but unless your concerns about Tesla outweigh your concerns for holding onto your money, exit your positions immediately and let the big guys take the fall on this one.
[Full disclosure: I still do not hold any TSLA stock, but I did approach my bank yesterday to take a substantial loan out on the title of my 2012 Model S. The intention of which was to buy $20–25K in TSLA yesterday — while it was still about $560. I missed that window while chasing down fraud and unethical business practices at the Tesla Henrietta service location — the eighth time I’ve been compelled to visit the center and third which required accompaniment by police. I also visited the Monroe County District Attorney’s office, the New York State Attorney General’s office (where I filed a complaint), spoke with two different law firms, and stopped at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle in an effort to bring media attention to the situation. All of this was because I weighed my options and considered it better — at least yesterday it was better — to begin exerting as much downward financial pressure on Tesla as I could as a consequence of the company’s unwillingness to even evaluate (let alone address) valid complaints.]
There is a significant amount of shady business taking place behind the scenes of Tesla, but today is NOT the day for standing on ceremony about it.
