Investor's Corner
Tesla stock (TSLA) one week after the Q1 2016 Report
Post Q1 Report Action
The technical response of the stock market to last week’s Tesla Q1 2016 report has been mostly negative. The stock lost quite a bit since last week, standing at around $208 when I write this, but overall 12-month Analyst Price Targets have actually increased with the average raising from $253 to $277, indicating that the Top Analysts did not see the report as negatively as this past week’s market action.
This is a small sample of the reactions from Top Analysts, noting that none of them changed their position to BUY, SELL or HOLD.
Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley, reiterated a BUY with $333 price target, commenting that “we forecast ~70k units in 2016 (vs. the reiterated guidance of 80-90k shipments), which is composed of ~16k Model X and ~54k Model S units. In 2Q, we forecast ~17k deliveries–inline with the outlook.”
Charlie Anderson of Dougherty resumed coverage of TSLA with a BUY and price target of $500, noting that “the focus coming out of the Q1 report is on managements decision to pull-forward its production goal of 500K vehicles from 2020 to 2018. While this aggressive schedule certainly increases the risk of nearer-term stumbles, it also significantly pulls forward the earnings power. Tesla has set a goal to produce 1MM vehicles by 2020, roughly 2x what most observers previously believed. Our view is that demand is not the question; it is solving the manufacturing challenges deftly as they come.”
Brian Johnson of Barclays reiterated a SELL with $165 price target.
Ryan Brinkman of J.P. Morgan reiterated a SELL with $185 price target, as he “Doubts Tesla Motors Can Meet Accelerated Production Target.”
Colin Rusch or Oppenheimer reiterated a BUY with $385 price target, indicating that “we believe the critical characteristic of TSLAs business model over the next 24 months will be operating leverage. We believe the company can achieve 15%+ incremental operating margins as it ramps the Model 3. We modeling TSLA reaching 500k vehicles in 2019 vs. the target of 2018, noting the company has a history of setting nearly unachievable goals. Effectively we are accelerating ramp by a year from our previous expectations, but calculate that if the company reaches its 500k vehicle target in 2018 and 1M in 2020, our EPS estimates will prove ~30% too low.”
See the table below from TipRanks (tipranks.com) for a complete summary of the current top analyst ratings.
![TSLA analyst coverage [Source: TipRanks]](http://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/TipRanks-1.png "TSLA analyst coverage [Source: TipRanks]")
TSLA analyst coverage [Source: TipRanks]
Swing Trading TSLA using the MACD
This is the first post where I will start outlining techniques that traders may want to use when trading TSLA stock.
I am mostly a “swing trader”. Swing Trading is a short term trading method that can be used when trading stocks and options. Whereas Day Trading positions last less than one day, Swing Trading positions typically last two to six days, but may last as long as two weeks (for TSLA sometime six-seven weeks). Swing traders use technical analysis to look for stocks with short-term price momentum. These traders aren’t interested in the fundamental or intrinsic value of stocks, but rather in their price trends and patterns.
There are a number of technical indicators that swing traders use. Today I will cover the MACD. The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) is a trend-following momentum indicator that shows the relationship between two moving averages of prices. The MACD is calculated by subtracting the 26-day exponential moving average (EMA) from the 12-day EMA. The Exponential Moving Average (EMA) is a type of moving average that is similar to a simple moving average, except that more weight is given to the latest data.
The good thing is that you really do not have to calculate any of these indicators yourself, as pretty much all trading platforms that I know of provide you with such indicators as an option when displaying the stock chart of a given security.
The following stock chart from Wall Street I/O shows the TSLA market data as “candlestick” (showing open, close, high and low of the day) for the past year, plus it also shows the MACD for the same period.
Source: Wall Street I/O
One technique that swing traders use is to enter a “long” trade when the MACD “crosses to the bulls”, and exit the trade when the MACD “crosses to the bears”. I have indicated these points in the chart for the huge run up between the February low and April high.
Micah Lamar is the CEO of Wall Street I/O (wallst.io), where together with his team of experts he helps people learn stock and option trading. Disclosure: I have been a subscriber to wallst.io for a few years.
This past weekend, Micah run a “MACD Validation” experiment on TSLA 1-year behavior up to last Friday close. The results are as follows.
Micah found that “if one had bought TSLA stock exactly a year ago, and held it for the full year, one would have incurred a $30 loss per share.
If one had bought and held TSLA stock while the MACD was bullish, one would be up $22 for the year.
If one had sold (short) TSLA stock while the MACD was bearish, one would be up $51 for the year.”
Someone trading both sides (long and short the stock) would be up a whopping $73, or a $30% gain.
Of course, trading the same entry and exit points based on the MACD with put or call options instead of stock would have resulted in returns 10 to 100 times or better than if just trading TSLA stock.
Micah indicates that “TSLA is a great stock for swing traders: the reason is that it has so much “beta.” A high beta indicates that a security is much more “volatile” than the rest of the market. Most high-tech stocks like TSLA have a beta of greater than 1, offering the possibility of a higher rate of return, but also posing more risk.
As far as where TSLA is today, it is still in “bearish” territory (as far as the MACD and other indicators are concerned), which for me it means that it is untouchable on long trades as “too risky”, and since I do not like to play on the downside for stocks of companies that are in my “buy what you know” list, I will not trade it again until the MACD crosses back to the bulls.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a massive beat on vehicle deliveries for the second quarter, delivering 489,126 vehicles and building 451,758 cars during the three-month span.
This was a major shock for those on Wall Street as they anticipated somewhere around 400,000 deliveries for the quarter, and showed Tesla still has plenty of demand for its vehicles around the world and in the U.S. despite losing the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year.
Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings Results
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.33 reported vs. $0.53 expected
- Revenues – $28.236 billion reported vs. $26.4 billion expected
- Free Cash Flow- -$1.092B
- Profit -$ 4.751B
Tesla (beat/missed) analyst expectations, so the market response to the company’s quarter is what we will look for next.
Tesla shares closed today down just over 1 percent, trading at $374.01.
In the past, it has been anyone’s guess with what Tesla shares will do after they report earnings. Strong quarters have resulted in sharp drops, while lackluster quarters have seen the stock shoot up considerably.
Tesla will hold its Q2 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q2 2026 Earnings Call https://t.co/zZS6ii2TWK
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) will report its earnings for the second quarter of 2026 this evening after market close, and investors and analysts are waiting anxiously to see what the company will report for the second three-month span of the year.
Analysts have already put out their expectations from a financial standpoint for the company’s second quarter, but what’s unknown is what Tesla plans to discuss during the call.
Financial Expectations
Wall Street consensus expectations put Tesla’s Earnings Per Share (EPS) at $0.53, while revenues are expected to come in around $26.4 billion.
This would compare to an EPS of $0.39 and $22.19 billion compared to Tesla’s Q2 2025. Last quarter, EPS came in at $0.41 on $22.387 billion of revenue. Additionally in Q1, Tesla beat analyst expectations, but shares dropped over 3 percent the following trading day.
What We Expect
In terms of discussions, Tesla earnings are pretty sporadic and depend on a handful of things, including current events, investor questions, and more.
Tesla uses a platform called Say to field questions from investors and analysts. These questions are what will be used during the call. Here are the top 5 from the Retail side and top 3 from the Institutional side:
Retail:
“Tesla has missed short-term guidance on robotaxi 3 earnings reports in a row, from 50% coverage of USA by end of 2025 to most recently 7 new cities in 1H26. What is keeping Tesla back from accomplishing these short term goals that they’ve set for themselves?”
“What are the main constraints to expanding robotaxi operations faster, and how do you see that lining up with Cybercab production?”
“What’s the current status of Optimus Gen 3 production ramp, initial deployment in factories, and external sales timeline/volume for 2027? What tasks can we expect the Optimus to perform by end of 2027?”
“To reward long-term Tesla retail shareholders for their loyalty, can you commit to achieving at least half of the goals outlined in your 2025 compensation plan before considering any offers to acquire or merge Tesla?”
“Why has growth of robotaxi vehicles stalled? When will we see cybercab start customer rides?”
Institutional
“Previously, you’ve said Tesla would lead the R&D while SpaceX would lead production for Terafab. Can you provide an update on how that division of responsibilities is evolving, and any additional clarity on the expected capital contributions from Tesla and SpaceX?”
“For autonomous driving, Tesla’s fleet created a huge data advantage by collecting billions of real-world miles. That advantage doesn’t yet exist for Optimus. How should we think about data availability and its impact on Optimus development?”
“Why is it necessary to limit robotaxi operations within specific zones within cities to start? Will every city have to be rolled out this way?”
Tesla will report earnings for Q2 this evening with the Shareholder Deck at 4 p.m. ET, with the call starting around 5:30 p.m. ET.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk handed Grok something no other AI company can get their hands on
Elon Musk says SpaceX will feed engineering data into Grok’s next model, avoiding restricted material.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that SpaceX will feed its internal engineering data into the next major training run for Grok, the AI model now folded into SpaceX following February’s merger. In a post on X, Musk wrote that SpaceX’s “massive corpus of world-class engineering data,” excluding anything restricted under U.S. arms export law, will be added during supplemental training of what he called the “2T run,” a reference to a roughly two trillion parameter model that would nearly double the parameters behind the latest Grok 4.5 that’s rolling out.
SpaceX’s massive corpus of world-class engineering data (excluding material blocked by ITAR) will be added during supplemental training of the 2T run.
This will dramatically improve Grok’s engineering capabilities. https://t.co/BbQEViFByn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
The excluded material that Musk is referring to would fall under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which restricts export of technical data tied to defense and space hardware. That likely rules out propulsion specifics for Merlin and Raptor engines along with guidance and control details for SpaceX’s launch vehicles, but leaves manufacturing knowledge, materials science, and Starlink hardware design on the table.
The announcement extends a pattern that has been building since SpaceX’s Nasdaq debut in June, when the company went public with Grok and xAI’s Colossus supercomputer folded into the pitch to investors.
Days after that listing, SpaceX closed its $60 billion all stock acquisition of coding startup Cursor, giving xAI both enterprise software distribution and a stream of real world developer data to train on. Grok 4.5 launched July 8 running partly on that Cursor training data, with Musk describing it as roughly comparable to Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 but faster and cheaper to run.
Feeding SpaceX’s own engineering data into the next AI model follows the same logic Musk has applied across xAI’s sister companies. Tesla supplies real world driving data and manufacturing expertise, X supplies conversational data, and now SpaceX supplies aerospace engineering data built up since 2002.
Musk did not give a release date for the upcoming AI model, referred to elsewhere as Grok 4.6. He has said the two trillion parameter run is in its final training phase and expected to wrap this week.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla is about to make parking in busy lots less stressful than ever
