Milu

Ya that’s a fair point, I’m not sure what the breakdown is of model 3 sales vs model y is so can’t quite confirm how much they are falling off the cliff. My personal feeling is that all this negativity will result in perhaps a 10% drop in sales this year so going from 1.8m to something over 1.6m vehicles sold. I’d start to worry about some serious brand impairment if it comes in below that. I think q1 could be quite weak though based upon on the negativity and the model y changeover but feel that there could be a better set of results in 2nd half of year.

As I’ve said previously I would encourage people to use a bit of sense when predicting the end for Tesla. In 2024 the company sold about 1.8m vehicles. They are currently transitioning the model y which is their largest selling vehicle and the worlds largest selling vehicle from its previous version to an updated model. This is being carried out from January to April/may and is occurring across multiple geographies, china in Jan/feb, US and Europe at the moment. It’s possible that some (but not all) of this drop in sales is down to this similar to if Apple was releasing a new version of the MacBook it’s likely they would experience a slowdown in sales of the existing model as people await the chance to buy the new iteration. So for the people predicting 50% drop in sales is your assessment that for calendar year 2025 Tesla total sales will go from 1.8m(2024 numbers) to around 900k, or if not what are you forecasting?

Not quite sure how Tesla, a company with a net $30b cash position gets ‘bankrupted’ exactly? People seem to forget that world is a very big place and while Elon is currently ruffling some feathers in Canada and Europe, in America due to its polarised political environment Tesla is likely gaining an equal amount of customers to ones he is losing, and in china I can’t imagine the typical consumer gives a single thought about Musk’s behaviour. I’d say there is likely some impact (5% or so) to overall global sales which obviously isn’t ideal but this just results in the company selling perhaps 1.9m vehicles this year instead of 2m.

I wouldn’t be so sure, Europe waited out trump for 4 years until 2020 and here they are waiting until 2028. And don’t be so sure the MAGA movement ends when trump leaves office. If the policies end up working Vance would be more than able to continue them for another 4-8 years. Either way Europe needs to toughen up. We are a block with an economy about 10 times the size of Russia and 4 times the population yet we are the ones who look intimidated.

Ethereum is building a financial platform, and it will be by far the most neutral platform that at the same time * allows to issue representations of financial assets * allows trading those assets * and permissionlessly create new financial products, such as derivative, based on them in existence. This is all very valuable activity. Capturing value from it is going to be possible, but it is not a priori obvious what the mechanisms are going to be. I still think it is some sort of fee mechanism -- in the rollup roadmap, I do continue to believe that the Ethereum L1 will be the crossroads between all those subdomains, and a lot of very valuable activity will continue to take place on it and that will generate valuable fees. (A decent amount of L1 scaling will be necessary for this to happen) If this turns out not to be the best value accrual mechanism, then there are interesting alternatives that I consider with an increasing degree of skepticism, but none of them are impossible: Value accrual through data availability fees, as the main medium of exchange asset in the ecosystem, and finally by being used as collateral (which is the riskiest). "The EF" does not have an opinion on this, as researchers we all form our own opinions. Personally I believe it is best if we focus on building a value-generating ecosystem on Ethereum, and I think that value capture will ultimately come naturally. This doesn't mean I don't think about it, but it is a great mistake to focus on it while the value generation part is still coming short. Again, I don't speak for the EF, but I have an individual opinion as a researcher. When I build a startup, of course I would like to make money, but I would still consider it as a success if it was useful to my customers and I ultimately went away empty-handed. Translating this to Ethereum, I do think that if we had a diverse ecosystem of rollups providing the world with interesting applications, I would consider this a success, but an even greater success would be if this ecosystem also made ETH the asset more valuable. I know that many believe that the rollup-centric roadmap will take away fee revenue and MEV from Ethereum and rollups might ultimately be parasitic. I think that's not true. I think that it will continue to be true that the highest-value transactions will happen on Ethereum L1, while rollups will grow the pie by providing plenty of space for users to transact on Ethereum. The relationship will be symbiotic: Ethereum provides rollups with cheap data availability (I think it should be cheap, Ethereum security should be affordable for everyone) and in return they make Ethereum L1 the natural crossroads for all financial activity for the really valuable transactions. Source: Not sure if you have discussed on this forum yet but I'm curious what your portfolio looks like. Based on your post history you look to be a big proponent of Ethereum. Does this make up the largest part of your networth, do you hold bitcoin and other cryptoassets, stocks, gold? It's a lot easier to get a sense of a person's posts once I have an idea where they put their money?

Ya maybe you will be right but let’s wait for the facts to play out. There is a lot of noise ( various anecdotes and media stories) about how Tesla is doomed and not much signal (actual reported numbers on a quarterly and annual basis).

Thankfully we have a very easy way to check how it will work out as tesla report deliveries every month. I think the current forecast is for 2m vehicle deliveries in 2025 so let's check back at end of year to see how well or badly things worked out.

Yes it's a bit strange alright, I don't recall much discussion or judgement about the personal lives of all the other CEO's discussed on this Investment forum. I'm sure Buffett, Munger, Bezos, etc all have various stories or rumours about them but I don't see how that warrants any discussion or relevance to the merits of their companies as potential stock investments.

Seems like twitter is almost back to being valued at it's original $44b purchase price, obviously he overpaid a lot at the time, but will be fun to see the heads explode when it gets to $100b. The man just continues to win no matter what people think of his personality or politics. Sure he is putting some people off and probably losing some customers for Tesla, but on the flip side he's probably attracting another group of people who traditionally wouldn't have bought Teslas.

I still hold some ETH but am gradually converting this over to my much larger bitcoin holdings. I’m not fully convinced in the future of the asset, at least from a price growth standpoint. I’m not sure I buy the it’s a currency argument and also wouldn’t want it to be a currency. People who want to participate in china will invest in stocks and shares of Chinese companies, sure they may have to exchange their dollars or euros in RMB to do so but its not like they are holding RMB for long term compounding purposes, they just hold it for a few mins before they buy the stock.

Belgium, LOTB.BR

I'm curious how they calculate Free Cash Flow? For 2023 for example I get cash flow from operations of €154m which if you adjust for the €2m of working cap adjustment and €18.8m of maintenance cap ex gets me €133m of free cash. Not sure why they choose EBITDA(u) rather than operating cash flow.

Ya I've been quite tempted too. I love everything except the price, and I have been one of those people who have made a number of valuation exceptions that have paid off in the past. Not sure whether to push my luck or not. Doing something like a 1-2% position and letting it ride might not be the worst idea.

Been on my watchlist for a long time but just can't get my ahead around the price people are willing to pay for essentially a delicious biscuit company.

A machine can now do this in millisecond for every company that has financial data on the web. Ben Graham and Buffett had an edge in the early days when you actually had to manually filter through this info and nobody else was doing it. Any body who thinks they have an ‘edge’ by doing something like this is fooling themselves.

Haha yes. I do find it quite funny how all the 'experts' in the FT and Economist were dissing Milei's policies when he came into power last year, and now that they have started to work they have backtracked massively. Same with Bukele in El Salvador. Surprised people put any weight in anything they say really. I'd trust the opinions of Jamie Dimon, Stan Druckenmiller, Buffett etc over some random journalist/economist. As you mentioned earlier tariffs aren't some new thing and they exist in just about every country in the world to some degree, yet when trump uses them panic ensues.

The thing that I wonder about is that all the supposed experts and talking heads claim that trumps tariffs will mainly end up hurting Americans. If that’s the case then why bother retaliating, just let them hurt themselves.

Sounds like you are enjoying life either way!

I've been wondering about fellow investors here on the board, which ones of you really enjoy the actual process of investing and which ones just care about the proceeds? Personally I really enjoy researching companies, assessing market dynamics, evaluating management trustworthiness, making bets (often contrarian) where you are staking a position on a future view of the world that may or may not transpire. It's almost like the worlds greatest game where you are completing against the smartest people in the world to make as high a return as you can on your correct decisions and as low a loss as possible on the incorrect ones. I'm somewhat addicted to the game of investing and I think even if some Genie could guarantee some high annual compound return by going 100% index fund but the only caveat is you can never research companies or make another investment again I'm not sure I would take it. I'm aware that this is totally irrational but I genuinely just like doing this for the mental stimulation, the money generated on the back end is obviously a pleasant outcome. Just something I've been thinking about a bit and wanted to see what others felt.

So the question is, would this impact your position size or confidence in continuing to hold your bitcoin?

I wouldn't get too far ahead of yourself with too much talk of a bubble burst. Obvioulsy today there looks like there will be a bit of a pullback but you have to remember that Google at Meta are trading in the 25-30 PE range, hardly 'bubble' levels. Microsoft and Apple a little higher in the 30-34 PE range. This is not the 50+ PE range of 2000 tech bubble, no matter how much people would like this to be the case. As I said above Nvidia will likely be hit hard, maybe a few others in that space, but I don't think the growth of big tech is going to be stopping anytime soon.

To take the other side of the argument, couldn't this deep seek development be a positive for many of the big tech companies, one of the main concerns I have with Meta, Google etc is the massive amount of cap ex they are planning to spend to stay at the cutting edge with these frontier models. If it's now the case (as demonstrated by deep seek) that this is not necessarily required shouldn't this result in a downward adjustment of future cap ex. Nvidia would strike me as being the main loser if this type of situation plays out.

Quite the outlier in Europe. Wonder what the background is on that, has there ever been a cgt tax in Belgium before, and is there some other rules where they end up getting their cut somehow? Might make more sense for the wealthy Europeans to start moving to Belgium rather than Monaco or Switzerland!

Europe is generally a very hard place to build wealth through investing due to these types of taxes and levels. Looking at how Denmark do things it almost makes me thankful to live in Ireland with our 33% cap gains rate, and no exit tax if you decide to leave. Might just keep sitting on any unrealised gains and eventually move back to canada in 10-15 years to retire and live off portfolio. Even through canada is seen as a relatively high tax country, if you aim to live solely off capital gains with no income, the tax rates are quite low.

I often find these types of predictions tend to be overblown as they don't consider the second order effects such as canada finding new trading partners or other adjustments. Similar doom mongering went on with Brexit or when russian gas supplies were cut off to Europe. The world and canada will adjust quickly to any new reality.