- The Finance Gourmet

Tesla Shares Fall as Musk Offers To Sell

November 8, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

People are always saying things like Bill Gates is worth $XX billion based upon the current Microsoft share price times the number of shares Bill Gates owns. While this is a reasonable approximation –and unless Gates is going to throw open his books, the only one we have– it is actually completely unrealistic. The same thing is true of Elon Musk, even though he has two big chunks of stock. Big Sells Equal Big Falls One of the problems with deciding that anyone is worth their shares times the share price is that the reality is that their shares are at once worth both more, and less, than the current share price. Ever wonder is Zelle a scam? In sort of a Schrödinger’s Cat of stock prices one can see how someone like Musk’s stock is worth both more and less than the current price per share. We got a nice example of the “less” thanks to Musk’s weekend tweet. On Saturday, Musk proposed selling 10% of his Tesla stock, if the people voted for it. By the time the poll ended, over 3.5 million people had voted (or more specifically 3.5 million Twitter accounts had voted). The result was …

Tesla Stock Buy or Sell?

January 5, 2021 by Finance Gourmet

Wall Street gave up giving honest buy and sell rankings years ago. Everyone knows “Hold” is code for sell, without making the company you are covering too mad to use your bank for future deals. But, even that wasn’t enough, with most firms adding a slew of not-so-easy to decode terms like overweight, moderate buy, underperform, underweight. All of this is to obfuscate the actual track record of these analysts which is often abysmal. The less accountability on Wall Street, the better. Is Tesla Stock a Good Buy? Traditionally, I don’t do buy/sell on stocks. It’s a slippery area, but when folks show up in my comments and email asking over and over again for the same thing, I at least consider it. Tesla and Bitcoin I’m writing about Tesla stock today, because I wrote about Bitcoin 20,000 last week (or was it the week before? — Holidays are tricky). Bitcoin and Tesla might sound unrelated, but their performance and trajectory as late are very similar. Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea in currency that is so new there is no real way to know how it will react or behave in the long term. Recently, however, all the naysayers have …

7 Important Things To Look For From the December Stock Market

December 1, 2020 by Finance Gourmet

Here we go. December 1, 2020 is a Tuesday, so the markets already got started on this week yesterday. This December is packed with interesting scenarios, events, and reports for investors. Without further ado, let’s jump into the 7 most important things to look for from the December stock market. Tesla Joins the S&P 500 Over a long enough period, the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) at the SP500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average drives some interesting decisions. Some of them prove to be remarkably prescient, others embarrassingly reversed. There is no denying that Tesla dominates news storylines in the automotive industry. Its market capitalization certainly qualifies for inclusion in the central S&P 500 index. On the other hand, Tesla stock is highly volatile, often tied to words its CEO blurts out on Twitter, or based on meeting tight-rope high production goals. More commonly missing those goals but getting credit for being kind of close. What is Rakuten? Joining the S&P 500 will give Tesla stock a new stability that comes from being part of all those market index mutual funds and market index ETFs. At the same time, the company may inject a bit of volatility back into …

Tesla Does Not Compete With Chevy and Nissan

August 9, 2017 by Finance Gourmet

Here, they come. It looks like the Nissan Leaf will be cheaper than a Tesla, so you know what that means. More articles where so-called analysts decry the prospects for the Tesla Model 3, because Chevy Bolt, and now Nissan, have cheaper electric cars available before the Model 3. This is dumb. Comparing Tesla Model 3 to Chevy Bolt is dumb. Comparing Tesla Model 3 to Nissan Leaf is dumb. Worrying about Tesla stock because less desired offerings are coming out with still less desired new models is dumb. (If you want to worry about Tesla stock, worry about the fact that they are always slower and later than they say. — Although I wouldn’t sell my stock…) The Spec Sheet Falsity Once upon a time, Consumer Reports poorly reviewed the Apple iPad. The reason? It compared specification sheets with other tablets, and the iPad had lower specs. Of course, this completely and utterly missed the point. Turns out that Consumer Reports always does this. I found out the hard way when we bought one of their “best buy” stoves only to find out that despite the great temperature readings they got on their laser thermometers, the flame pattern was …

Model 3 Pre-Orders and Tesla Stock

April 4, 2016 by Finance Gourmet

Tesla has had a big weekend. At last count, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter account, there were 276,000 pre-orders for the new Tesla Model 3. An earlier tweet referenced an average order price, with options, of $42,000. Musk is Tesla’s CEO, so this counts a public disclosure of material facts of a publicly traded company. As you can imagine, there is a lot of jabbering about what this does or does not mean for Tesla. Let’s look at the facts to get an idea of just how much good news there is, or is not, going on here. First, as some have pointed out, multiplying $42,000 times 276K pre-orders comes out to over $11 billion in Model 3 pre-orders. That would be by far the biggest income Tesla has ever had. However, that is nothing more than a paper calculation. How much of that money Tesla actually sees depends upon a lot factors, including how many people decide to cancel their fully refundable pre-order. That being said, pre-ordering a Model 3 Tesla requires registering, and a $1,000 deposit. While the deposit is fully refundable, it is money paid. In other words, this isn’t a bunch of internet kids running bots to …