I don't mean to rub it in , those people who said to short Tesla a couple weeks ago were sure wrong. Last week Steve Eisman who rose to fame in 2008 by betting against the housing market, shorted Tesla. That position is probably at least 25% underwater now. Not only that, but Tesla losing money does not mean it is insolvent, because it can keep raising money and most of those losses are capital expenditures instead of operating losses.
Many are shorting Tesla and continue to lose money because of the markets idiocy. If I were a billionaire I would short it, but as it stands I cannot risk losing money just because of stupid prolonged hype.
Not sure if it's wise to short Tesla just yet. (not financial advice obv)
yeah, I don't think I have seen a bigger wealth destroyer in my lifetime than betting against Tesla. So many fortunes and careers ruined over the past 13 or so years Tesla has been public, whether on a large scale like hedge funds or smaller like /r/WallStreetBets. Just when Tesla looks its weakest, it has a tendency of suddenly and inexplicably surging 20% or more in a month. happens so many times.
Short sellers don't need Tesla to fail to make money. There's plenty of room between Tesla being worth 50-60 billion and Tesla being worth 0. 50-60 billion of market cap means that Tesla has to do some absolutely crazy things in the next few years in an increasingly competitive environment while they've struggled consistently to meet production targets in less competitive environments. They have some problems such as a convertible bond issue for almost one billion due in Feb'19 that only adds to the cash burn problems if they can't meet the $360 convertible price. Short sellers push a narrative because they want the price to go down, but they really only take the position because they think that the market has currently mispriced the firm and there is opportunity there. They're not inventing problems, they're pointing out that they're there (perhaps exaggerating, but that's for the people to identify if true or not with the money they put on longs/shorts for Tesla).
Even though Bloomberg has pronounced Tesla dead on more than one occasion, I’m still not convinced their recent troubles are big enough for the short sellers to make their money back.
I'm not sure if it is still true but up until the past month or two Tesla was the most shorted stock in the market and you couldn't watch CNBC for 30 minutes w/o a talking head positing that it would go bankrupt before the year was out. Fast forward to today and every automaker is falling all over themselves to copy the Tesla model and Tesla has positive cash flow and $5.3 billion cash on hand.
A lot of people have taken a short position and that is driving a lot of this gain. The shorts are getting squeezed bad and have to cover thus further driving up the price. It is a lot harder to make a long term short bet due to the potential of unlimited loss and your shares being recalled.
Tesla has done better than expected with the Model 3 despite overpromising a lot and missing a lot of targets. Actually just last year Elon said he was leasing model 3's now to buy them back for a fleet of robotaxis that will start this year (LOL). But he has the hype and people's attention. It is just hard to time when that cycle will collapse.
I think people are shorting the company because it's bankrupt and way behind no fulfilling orders + having major rework problems in factories.
Elon likes to push that narrative that there's this epic battle between himself and people with short positions in a good vs. evil way.
In fact, it seems pretty apparent that the company is in trouble and the people saying that have put their money where their mouth is. They also probably aren't obsessing over it every last minute or pushing narratives to try to get the stock to tank, it'll do that on it's own. In fact, I bet the majority of people who are holding tesla shorts aren't sneaky oil execs, but hedge fund guys who want a pickup/hedge for the market as a whole. It's pretty common to short stocks that look weak to protect against general market volatility for when your main portfolio takes a little dip
The conspiracies and the cult of personality surrounding a company in moderate financial trouble with problems delivering their product is pretty strange to me. Startups fail all the time, they also over promise and under deliver all the time.
There haven't been any real claims of people trying to influence the tesla stock price other than Elon. If he has this kind of info, he should send it to the SEC since they should be able to track down the nefarious bastards that hold a short position.
This is one of those situations that is probably exactly what it looks like. Elon is learning that hardware is much tougher to build than software.
People haven't stopped shorting Tesla. Its value is predicated on full autonomy and they're nowhere near that.
Also, shorting and sharing critical news is not a conspiracy, it's how a healthy market functions. If Elon or his fans were confident in the company's long term value they would simply buy more when people short it, not complain about the shorts.
People and the media is not stating the simple fact that they short interest has been over 100% since June. I bought a bunch and told all my friends/family about it and everything laughed at me. Now those people asking me what they think about it.
Likely they started short positions around $10 in 2019, had a nice profitable trade, started to bleed out then doubled down and increased position as it picked up momentum. Now they are far over their head and from the looks of things, stock is going to $200.
Lots of people made tons of money shorting tesla. Until they didnt and stock kept doubling.
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