Mega Thread for Tesla Investors

The other way to profit from down turns in stock price is to buy options, for which you can get the prices from your brokerage account. I would not suggest options trading unless you are an experienced investor and even less shorting, that is hard core.

Here is a quick article on the difference between shorting and purchasing a put.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/shortvsput.asp16

 

I was curious about how these mechanisms worked as somethings had me curious:

• Margins are leveraged - it appears that there can be a 2-to-1 ratio between the shorted stock and the margin balance. One source claimed $10,000 of shorted stock required only $5,000 in the margin account. This is a backdoor to the leveraged stocks that helped trigger the 1929 crash.
• Margin accounts are taxed by interest that for small investors, less than $10,000, can approach 9% per year.
• The brokerage house profits by trade fees and some part of the interest although this is an area that still seems a little fuzzy.
• There is no time limit on this 'loan of stock' yet I suspect the loaner can force a 'margin call.' That criteria is not clear.

My reason for buying Tesla is driven my judgement of the facts and data versus trying to become an active stock trader. That is why I am all but immune to the usual buzz about stocks and companies. Now if someone were to suggest a systemic defect in Teslas that had their rear bumper covers coming off in hurricane flooded areas . . . well I'm sure Yahoo financial would post articles about the weak Tesla bumpers and rear-ends falling off. <grins>

Bob Wilson

 

Facts and data:

• https://www.tesla.com/blog/q3-2018-vehicle-safety-report - find empirical data.
  
• https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459018023815/tsla-ex991_6.htm - quarterly SEC filings

The most recent year, 2017, only 7 fatal Tesla accidents. Similar numbers for 2016. It is really going to be hard to find Tesla's having a bad safety year.

Bob Wilson

 

Real news: Model 3 achieves a perfect crash safety rating, a 5-star safety rating in every category and sub-category. This ranks it among the very safest of all cars. (Perhaps that's one of the reasons why Tesla's stock price was up yesterday?)

Fake news: Tesla is making "wild claims" about the Model 3's safety rating.

Guess which of these is the subject of comments by our resident serial Tesla basher, "TeslaInvestors"?

More real news from Mashable: "Sorry Tesla haters, the Model 3 just got a perfect safety rating"

Hey, "TeslaInvestors"! How about if, just once, you try not to be quite so predictable, hmmm?

 

Source: How Tesla Made the Model 3 So Safe, David Tracy, Oct 9, 2018

Tesla told me that it dug into NHTSA’s data, and looked at overall probability of injury figures. The company sent me a link to some of NHTSA’s data; here’s a look at the injury probabilities to various parts of the body during a frontal crash test:


And here are the star ratings for the frontal crash test:

...
So basically, when Tesla says its Model 3 has the “lowest probability of injury” ever tested by NHTSA, it means that the overall VSS score (which represents the “relative risk of injury with respect to a baseline of 15 percent”) of 0.38 is lower than that of any car ever tested.

...
That’s impressive, any way you slice it.​

The rest may be too technical for short-seller advocates to understand.

Bob Wilson

 

Threat? I challenge you to back that up. So far as I can see, the NHTSA merely stated that its methodology in assigning ratings does not support Tesla's claim, and that it does not stand behind what Tesla is claiming.

Note that the NHTSA has not said that Tesla's claims are actually wrong!

But of course, it's no surprise that serial Tesla bashers like "TeslaInvestors" have rushed to twist facts and churn out fake news to claim that Tesla has made an untrue assertion here.

However, since my primary interest here is the pursuit of Truth, I'll point out that the NHTSA's test scores do not actually prove that the Model 3 is the very safest car of all. It only proves that it is safest according to the NHTSA's test methods. Note that the NHTSA was criticized in the past for doing only full-contact testing for head-on crash tests. Now they have added "small overlap" and some sort of half-contact (only half the front of the vehicle in contact with the solid object during the crash) testing, which insurance carriers say more accurately represents many or perhaps most real-world head-on crashes.

We will hope the NHTSA's crash testing does correctly identify which cars are safest, and which the least safe, in a real-world crash. But at best those tests will only be an imperfect simulation of what happens during a real-world crash.

Serial Tesla bashers claim the IIHS's (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) crash tests are "more reliable" or "more accurate". That is, of course, an unproven claim, and they say that only to create FUD; to cast doubt on Tesla's superior crash test ratings. The IIHS's crash tests are different than the NHTSA, but different does not mean "better".

Ho hum. Another day, another bit of FUD churned out by our resident Serial Tesla basher. (But hey, we're down to only one of them infesting this forum. That's certainly an improvement!)

​

 

The InsideEVS news site has an article on the very subject we're discussing here:

"Is Tesla Fabricating Data To Make Its Model 3 Appear Safest?"

But if you actually read the article, it's clear the answer is "No!" Of course, we can't expect TeslaInvestors to ever admit he's wrong here, because that doesn't fit his Tesla-bashing agenda.

There is some good discussion in comments following the article. I think this comment best sums up the situation:

CDAVIS
________________

Seems that both NHTSA and Tesla are correct:​

NHTSA is correct in that it does publish the NHTSA raw score data used by NHTSA to determine which cars meet the minimum threshold scores to receive NHTSA’s highest safety “5-Star” classification and that NHTSA does not have an *official* safety classification beyond the “5-Star” designation.

Tesla is also correct that the raw NHTSA published data shows that Tesla Model S scored the highest in the raw data metrics.

I can imagine the traditional car makers are giving NHTSA flack over Tesla’s self promotion about Tesla’s ranking #1 (“safest”) in safety… thus the NHTSA clarification news release which basically says “safest” is not an *official* NHTSA designation.

​

 

Not faulting the poster but the mess NHTSA created:

So the 0-5 Stars is what?

• Is a "4 Star" car as good as a "5 Star"
• Is a "3 Star" car as good as a "4 Star"
• Is a "2 Star" car as good as a "3 Star"
• Is a "1 Star" car as good as a "2 Star"
• Is a "0 Star" car as good as a "1 Star"

What NHTSA did is use the "Star" scale to substitute for the actual risk of injury from the engineering metrics. The risk is a real number with a much larger data range than 0-5. The truth looks like a "00.0%" format number.

Bob Wilson

 

So then, you've got nuthin'. Just repeating what some reporter at Bloomberg or Yahoo Finance wrote, not what the NHTSA actually said. Thanks for confirming that this is just more of your Tesla bashing FUD.

If we're gonna repeat things, there's this actual news rather than your fake news:

From Mashable: "Sorry Tesla haters, the Model 3 just got a perfect safety rating"

​

 

To be fair, perhaps it's good that the NHTSA doesn't insist on precision in its ratings. After all, any test done under controlled conditions isn't going to perfectly replicate all the things that can happen in real-world traffic accidents. The best the NHTSA (or IIHS or anybody else) is perform crash tests that are as close to real-world conditions as can reasonably be done given a limited number of vehicles to destroy.

Tesla is correct to say that the actual data from the NHTSA's crash ratings show the Model 3 is the safest car in NHTSA's tests. But nobody's tests under controlled conditions, including the NHTSA's crash tests, perfectly replicate real world situations where multiple variables -- multiple conditions and multiple forces -- are involved. Therefore, it's an overstatement to say the Model 3 is the safest car.

​

 

In engineering we call this 'letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.' I'm OK with having the 'Stars' if the calculated, actual risk is available, say a subscripted smaller text.

In contrast, here is the NHTSA spokesman:


Bob Wilson