Investor's Corner
$TSLA action leading up to Tesla’s reveal of Master Plan, Part Deux
It has not been an easy two weeks for Tesla in the news. Lately all the news has been fairly negative:
- Negative response to the Tesla – SolarCity merger from the great majority of brokerage firms covering Tesla.
- First driver killed in an accident involved with a Tesla vehicle operating on autopilot.
- Start of preliminary evaluation from NHTSA of various Tesla accidents involving autopilot.
- Start of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation, independent of the NTSA’s inquiry into the collision that killed 2015 Model S driver Joshua Brown.
- Start of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe over fatal autopilot crash and whether it was “material” and Tesla was at fault for failing to inform its shareholders prior to the last stock offering.
- Request by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, for Tesla to “brief Committee staff on the details of this incident, including the technology that was in use at the time, Tesla’s actions in response, and the company’s cooperation with NHTSA.”
That mass of negative reporting would normally kill any stock. But what was the effect on $TSLA for the past couple of weeks? Not much.
We had one week of still higher highs on the stock, followed by flat “compression” last week. This week $TSLA stock is back up again, especially Wednesday ahead of the company’s release of its “Masterplan Part 2”. The stock shot up by $1 in the span of 10 minutes, after CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the plans would be released later in the day.
Now that the Master Plan Part Deux has been published, it will be interesting to see Thursday what will be the response to the Plan from the broad market.
Stock Action
Looking at the $TSLA stock chart for the past couple of weeks, the technicals are still greatly in its favor. The latest Heikin Ashi – MACD “swing” has provided already an upside of over $11 since the MACD crossed to the bulls on June 30. Anyone that pulled the trigger on that day on the buy side is now sitting happy on a nice gain. Anyone trading options is sitting happy on huge gains.
Right now $TSLA stock is all fired up: Heikin Ashi green for 13 out of the past 17 sessions, stock above the 200-day moving average, MACD positive and still crossed to the bulls.
Source: Wall Street I/O
By the way, the charts from Wall Street I/O have an unique “smart study” that back-calculates all the effects of indicators like the MACD over a period of time. As one can see from the chart above, $TSLA is a wonderful stock for MACD “swing” traders.
Master Plan 2.0
I, like everybody, am anxiously waiting for the street’s response to Tesla’s Master Plan 2.0.
Today Jim Cramer was quoted on TheStreet as saying that “Tesla’s New Master Plan Won’t Matter, the Stock is ‘Heavily Shorted’.”
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“It doesn’t really matter — this stock is so heavily shorted ,” Cramer said on Wednesday. “It can’t be borrowed, thank you Doug Kass for giving me that information.”
Q2 2016 Financial Results Date
Lastly, on July 19 Tesla sent a letter to investors indicating that “Tesla will post its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2016, after market close on Wednesday, August 3, 2016. ” According to the letter, “Tesla management will hold a live question & answer webcast that day at 2:30pm Pacific Time (5:30pm Eastern Time) to discuss the Company’s financial and business results and outlook.” These are the details of the Q&A Webcast:
What: Date of Tesla Q2 2016 Financial Results and Q&A Webcast
When: Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Time: 2:30pm Pacific Time / 5:30pm Eastern Time
Webcast: http://ir.tesla.com (live and replay)
Update: Early morning Thursday pre-market action
$TSLA stock is off by $3 at $225. The initial reaction to the second iteration of the master plan from Wall Street analysts “seems to have failed to assuage investor’s fears”, as reported by TheStreet.com.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
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Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
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Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
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