Investor's Corner
Tesla shares (TSLA) are far more bullish than short-term investors realize
Tesla stock (NASDAQ:TSLA) has been hit hard since April, with its share price down 9% year-to-date. Compared to the S&P 500, which is up roughly 2% this year, Tesla’s stocks are undoubtedly challenged.
While there is no doubt that Tesla’s share price has been beleaguered since April, TSLA’s weak performance could actually be somewhat bullish, especially when one looks into the historical trends of the electric car and energy company’s stock performance. Below is a chart depicting TSLA’s weekly trading action since 2012.
TSLA’s long-term weekly chart since 2012. [Credit: The Street]
Tesla’s stock price has been trending up and to the right since 2012. The Street noted that even without the sudden spike in early 2013 when the company went to market on its first all-electric sedan, Model S, shares of TSLA have exhibited an uptrend that is difficult to discount. Every time TSLA hits trendline support, shareholders have stepped forward to bid shares higher. This particular trend has been consistent since the summer of 2013.
The relative strength of TSLA shares is also noticeable in the chart above. Relative strength measures TSLA’s shares against the broad market, and as could be seen in the graph, the trend is also steadily pointing up to the right since 2013. This shows that Tesla has actually been outperforming the rest of the market over the past few years, despite being heavily shorted.
Tesla’s relative strength line appears to be testing its own uptrend once more. The last time this happened, it was November 2016, and as could be seen in TSLA’s long-term chart, the company’s shares could very well be on the verge of beating the rest of the S&P 500 again.
TSLA’s short-term weekly chart since 2017. [Credit: The Street]
A look into TSLA’s charts since 2017 could provide a clue as to how Tesla shares can get back on its feet again. A good number of Tesla investors have been focused on the intermediate-term trend, which is represented by the red line in TSLA’s short-term chart. At lower levels, however, TSLA shares have been looking constructive so far, forming an ascending triangle pattern with a breakout level at $310 per share.
If Tesla shares push beyond the $310 barrier, the company could keep its short-term momentum steady. Hitting the $310 mark will also be in line with the relative strength that TSLA has been exhibiting since 2013.
Amid reservations about the company’s capability to prevent a capital raise this year, recent reports have emerged that Hedge fund giant and billionaire George Soros, through his investment firm Soros Fund Management LLC, has taken a $35 million stake in Tesla’s convertible bonds during the first three months of 2018, as revealed by filings to the SEC.
TSLA’s recent challenges have sated the appetite of short-sellers, making the company the most-shorted business in the stock market today by the amount of equity at stake, with 38,258,654 shares held short as of 4/9/18. It is steadily becoming more and more expensive to keep a short position in the electric car maker’s stocks, however. In a research note published earlier this month, S3 Partners analyst Ihor Dusaniwsky called the bottom on short-selling activity, noting that the costs of keeping a short position have risen to 3.69% compared to 1% last December.
As of writing, Tesla shares are trading up 0.36% at $287.50 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Investor's Corner
Tesla crushes Wall Street expectations, beats delivery estimates by over 15 percent
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) beat Wall Street expectations of 406,000 vehicles delivered in Q2 by reporting 480,126 deliveries for the three months ending in June.
Tesla reported it delivered 467,762 Model 3 and Model Y units, while 12,364 Model S, Model X, and Cybertrucks switched hands during the quarter. The Model S and Model X were officially sunset this past quarter and will no longer be part of the company’s Production & Delivery reports moving forward.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 480,126 vehicles in Q2, ANNIHILATING Wall Street expectations of 406,000. Production was reported at 451,758.
Deliveries:
Model 3/Y: 467,762
Other Models: 12,364Production:
Model 3/Y: 442,936
Other Models: 8,822 https://t.co/TTHwQAsKt8 pic.twitter.com/7qI4Zj6FE5— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 2, 2026
The quarter is a pleasant surprise and a good rebound from Q1, when Tesla slightly missed the Wall Street consensus of 365,645 cars by reporting 358,023 deliveries for the first three motnhs of the year.
Energy storage deployments also provided some strength in Tesla’s delivery report, hitting 13.5 GWh for Q2. This is a particular division of Tesla’s business that has been overwhelmingly robust over the past few years, truly being a strong point of the company’s overall model.
For the year, Tesla analysts still predict deliveries to trend in the 1.69 million unit region, a modest 3 to 5 percent increase from the 1.64 million cars the company delivered last year. Tesla will likely return to more sequential and noticeable year-over-year growth as the Cybercab project starts to ramp up considerably in the next few years.
Tesla has some other potential catalysts to spur vehicle deliveries, too. Not only is it expecting Cybercab to truly start making a change in the next few years, but other vehicles could be entering the company’s lineup.
Tesla sends production Cybercab with no steering wheel, pedals to on-road testing
The slightly longer Model Y L has been a highly speculated release candidate in the U.S. It has already done incredibly well in China, and U.S. buyers have been wanting slightly more interior space than the Model Y. Now that the Model X is gone, it is more needed than ever.
Q2 highlights a pretty stable automotive division within Tesla, and no true concerns arise from these figures, especially considering it managed to beat expectations convincingly.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
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