Batteries or Bollingers? Observing Tesla from a Distance

Shares of Tesla are trading 4-5% lower this morning which, frankly, is the equivalent of throwing a deck chair off the Titanic with respect to the prior appreciation the share price has enjoyed the last several quarters, including the horrifying but ultimately ephemeral March bloodbath. 

As prominent and legendary Wall Street short-sellers like Jim Chanos have likely appeared to be incompetent dinosaurs to a new batch of market players in the form of aggressively bullish TSLA long-only speculators, it was interesting to see idiosyncratic CEO Elon Musk actually throw cold water on the wild buzz leading up to Tesla's Tuesday evening battery event, warning the company's new technologies will take time to scale.

As such, TSLA is lower as I write this. 

In markets like these, especially, but really in all markets, it is so easy to lose sight of the big picture and get caught-up in near-term trends which seem like they will persist indefinitely. As a result, we regularly look at longer-term timeframes with Members for perspective and context in all markets, really. But especially in this one. 

And when we take a step back and see the TSLA monthly timeframe, updated below, back to trading well above the upper monthly Bollinger Band into the latest bout of strength (compare that to prior times where price has "punched" up through the upper monthly Bollinger, leading at least to some sideways/corrective movement, in arrows) it seems inevitable that the market was likely looking for any old reason to come in a bit.

Going forward, I suspect we will see more convenient sell-offs in extended tech monsters like TSLA, despite how day-to-day resilient the Nasdaq appears to be in various spot.