[legion]

I don't think these people are wrong, but trying to time a financial market is a fool's errand. The problem with shorting is that you can be forced to close the position (at a loss) before you are ready. The bigger problem is that your gains are capped (at the price of the stock times the number of shares you have shorted) and the losses are unlimited.

Trying to do battle with a cult and its leader is even more problematic.

https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-short-sellers-musk-20190408-story.html

It’s a sunny day in March and “Machine Planet” is flying a single-engine Cessna over Northern California. He’s cruising at 1,500 feet toward a massive lot leased by electric-car maker Tesla. His mission: to burst the Tesla bubble. And make some money doing it.

What he sees today makes his eyes widen: more than 100 car-carrier trailers, the kind you see on highways hauling new cars to dealers. They’re lined up in neat rows. Empty. Idle.

“Ten days left in the quarter, and they’re just sitting there,” said Machine Planet, peering down at the remote landscape outside Lathrop. Tesla bought those trailers to aid what Chief Executive Elon Musk said will be an unprecedented wave of new car deliveries in March. But to Machine Planet — that’s the name he uses on Twitter — the scene just confirms his suspicions that there are lots all around the U.S. filled with unsold Tesla cars. (He and others claim to have counted 52.)
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Most $TslaQ posters try to remain nameless, citing the repercussions faced by some Tesla critics, including death threats to some $TslaQ members and harassment by Musk himself.

On a Hawthorne sidewalk not far from another Musk company, SpaceX, a man raises his iPhone to get a good camera angle.

It’s after dark. Model 3s by the hundreds are parked inside a lighted-up three-level parking garage. The cars are covered in dust. According to the man, some have been in there for months.

“I wanted Tesla to make it,” he says as he taps the big red button. “I’m a car guy, man. The Model S was a great car, especially when they came out with the dual motor.”

The man says he works for a short seller who goes by the Twitter handle Latrilife. In return for scouting out and monitoring Tesla delivery centers and storage sites around L.A., he gets $20 an hour.

Such storage practices are “extremely unusual” in the auto industry, said Bill Hampton, a Detroit veteran who runs AutoBeat Daily, an online industry newsletter.

Tesla doesn’t have traditional dealers, whose lots are filled with Fords, Chevys and Hondas awaiting buyers. That could account for some of Tesla’s scattered inventory, he said.

“But cars shouldn’t be sitting in staging lots for that long under any circumstances,” he said, “unless you have too many cars.”

Tesla declined to discuss the cars in the Hawthorne lot.
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$TslaQ has no leader, but it does have a hero. His name is Lawrence Fossi, a lawyer and New York money manager who contributed to the Twitter hashtag as well as investor site Seeking Alpha under the moniker Montana Skeptic — until he was exposed by Musk.

According to Fossi, after he was outed on Twitter last July, Musk personally called the small investment office he works for. Musk told his boss he wasn’t happy about the online activity and threatened to sue Fossi for defamation. (Tesla doesn’t dispute that Musk contacted the company.)

Meanwhile, Tesla’s public relations department sent emails to the media naming Fossi and encouraging reporters to call his boss — phone number included. The communications executive involved declined to discuss that matter.

“I had never before heard from Tesla or Elon Musk to correct anything I wrote,” Fossi said. “I would have been happy to correct anything that was wrong.”
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The short thesis gained traction last week when Tesla announced a dramatic drop in deliveries in the year’s first quarter — Model 3 deliveries fell 19% from the previous quarter, and older Models S and X models tumbled 56%.
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But he noticed car-buyer demand was a big topic on $TslaQ. Contributors posted Google satellite shots of lots in remote locations, far from the company’s Fremont factory, where cars were being stored.

One spot was in Lathrop, not far from Stockton, in an unirrigated section of the Central Valley known as the “dust bowl.” A couple of $TslaQ contributors had spotted an ad for Tesla jobs there. They found what seemed like hundreds or thousands of Model 3s being trucked into a lot through a gate and behind fences. But they couldn’t get a good look inside.

“So I flew to Lathrop,” Machine Planet said. “There was this amazing moment when I realized the entire facility was packed with cars.” More than 3,000, he said.
“That was entirely the moment where we went from kind of believing Elon about demand and not being able to build enough cars to [finding evidence that] the cars are either not sold or not salable.”
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One man started sending a drone over automobile auction houses, posting videos of Teslas stored there.

A loosely formed Shorty Ground Force began posting pictures of Teslas stored for weeks on lots across the country. Crow Point Partners, an investment firm with a short position in Tesla, periodically posted pictures of Model 3s parked in Norwood, Mass., covered in deep snow. The snow recently melted, but most of the cars are still there, the firm contends.

Just last Tuesday, a $TslaQ contributor posted a video that appeared to show dozens of Teslas parked on the fifth floor of a shopping mall parking garage in Buena Park.
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A reporter roamed a public parking lot outside the Crunch Gym in Burbank, where more than 100 Teslas sat. The vehicle identification numbers showed that many were manufactured in 2018.

Machine Planet has created a website called Crowdsourced Tesla Research at tslaq.org, in part to escape the snark and hot takes that infect Twitter. He said readers could draw their own conclusions, but “we think there are at least 10,000 unsold Model 3s out there.”

He backs up his assertion with data from IHS Markit, a market research firm, as reported recently in the New York Times: Tesla said it delivered 245,000 cars in 2018. Most were in the United States. But IHS said only 164,000 were registered nationwide.

An IHS spokeswoman said the timing of reported sales could account for some of the difference, but for the full story, “your questions are best to be addressed to Tesla.”

The shorts say distorted sales claims fit with a long list of hyperbolic and misleading Musk statements...