Usual disclaimer: TSLA shareholder
Personally, I don’t think their valuation is irrational. They’re not a car company, they’re an energy storage company, the market for which is enormous.
A bit down the page on the right, you'll see "Shares Short", "Short Ratio", "Short % of Float", and "Shares Short (prior month)".
What that is telling you is that almost $10B of Tesla stock has been borrowed and sold (with the profit coming from buying in the future at lower prices, ie, betting against TSLA). That is increased about 7% from the prior month, and would take almost 5 entire days of average trading volume to close out all the short positions.
This is a high level of betting against a stock by any standard.
I wouldn't say so. There are other heavily shorted stocks that have a much higher short ratio because of their small float (e.g. MTCH).
>but is there a good way to determine who?
Short sellers don't have to disclose their positions, unlike investors who're long the stock. You can try to get a better sense of who's thinking what through headlines and analyst notes/reports.
Side note: Elon tweeted out that we'd see the 'burn of the century' (a short squeeze) and that it would be bigger than the VW/Porsche squeeze in 08.
If there's a way to report who is short a stock, I don't know it. There are also other trades to profit from decreases in an underlying security (buying puts, selling calls) and I don't know about reporting obligations there, either.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/01/tesla-short-interest-hits-re...
Really? That's nonsense. This sentiment is a great example of what's so toxic about the public markets now. Everyone is complaining that so much value creation is happening in private companies going public later - a big reason is because of this idea that investors should care about when one person at a 36,000 person company goes on vacation and that this should move the stock price. Ridiculous. It's distracting noise.
Btw - I don't believe he is "on vacation". It's something else, but probably doesn't matter in the end.
Maybe if you had hundreds of thousands invested in TSLA and were concerned about their downward spiral you’d think different.
There's no such thing for a public company. It either talks to the board, which represents investors, or to the public, since it is impossible to know who owns shares of a public company.
And in practice, given index funds, most people do.
But then that would imply that Tesla has an obligation to make sure third party news outlets report on every holiday taken by every executive. I'm not saying it has to be private information, but why not announce it on their website? Why does the Wall Street Journal have to do it?
Public companies have to publicly report any "relevant facts" that could seriously impact the company and the investors. A Senior Vice President of Engineering taking a leave of absence of many weeks (or more, with no end announced) during a major engineering crisis in the company is by all means a relevant fact.