Tesla stock extends rally with Q1 delivery data, earnings on deck | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Tesla shares bumped higher in early Tuesday trading, following on from their strongest rally in four months, as investors looked to a series of key reports in coming weeks.

Tesla’s (TSLA) months-long slump was partly reversed Monday with a near 12% leap for the EV maker, the biggest advance since September. The market move pared the decline from its mid-December peak to around 42%.

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Retail buyers appeared to drive much of the advance, having purchased around $3.2 billion of shares last week, taking the two-week total to an estimated $8 billion.

The surge might have responded in part to the coordinated challenge to the EV maker’s brand from the Takedown Tesla movement, which has gained traction over the past month.

Elon Musk’s all-hands meeting last week, during which he urged Tesla employees not to sell their shares and touted the company’s prospects in self-driving, robotics and energy storage, also looks to have steadied the ship.

“Tesla stock goes up and it goes down,” Musk told Tesla employees during the video meeting, broadcast on his X social media platform. “But actually it’s still the same company. It’s just people’s perception of the future.”

‘Tesla stock goes up and it goes down,’ Elon Musk told Tesla employees last week. ‘But actually it’s still the same company.’

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The group’s fundamental issues remain significant, however, with slumping sales, narrowing profit margins, product recalls and leadership questions tied to Musk’s efforts with a Trump administration cost-cutting effort.

European sales of Teslas in free fall

Brand erosion in Europe, meanwhile, continues apace: Data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, published Tuesday, showed a 42.6% Tesla sales slump over the first two months of the year to around 17,000 units.

Sales in China, meanwhile, were down 49% in February, to just under 30,700, as domestic rivals such as BYD, (BYDDY) Geely (GELYY) and Nio (NIO) continue to gain market share.

Those figures, as well as the emotionally charged protests seen around the U.S. as part of the Takedown Tesla movement plus regular factory maintenance, have cast a shadow over the group’s first-quarter delivery report, expected early next week, and how they’ll affect its more detailed earnings report, due later in April.

Earlier this month Wall Street was estimating Tesla’s Q1 deliveries at 418,000, a solid 8% gain from the year-earlier tally of 387,000. But that current estimate has been steadily pared over the past three weeks to 355,000, indicating an expected drop of 15%.

Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter sees, however, an “outside chance” that Tesla’s first-quarter deliveries could come in flat with a year earlier, citing data showing 17,400 registrations in China last week, the strongest so far this year.

“In European and U.S. factories, where retooling generally takes longer to complete, the shutdown impact will almost certainly be larger (hence our expectation that companywide Q1 deliveries will fall year over year in Q1),” said Potter, who reiterated his overweight rating and $450 price target on Tesla stock.

“That would be a solid result, in our view, given the disruptive impact of a factory shutdown earlier this quarter,’ he added.

Don’t count Musk out: Tesla holder Tengler

Nancy Tengler, chief executive and chief investment officer of Laffer Tengler Investments and a notable Tesla shareholder, argues, however, that while EV sales are to Tesla what iPhones are to Apple, the real value is found in “Full-Self-Driving, which really is AI (and) the megautility-grade batteries that will allow green energy to be stored and utilized.”

“The mistake that I made with Tesla over the years is when Elon was sleeping on the factory floor and going on the Joe Rogan show and smoking pot, and his senior staff was turning over, and there were no earnings and an insider board, I felt like it was gambling, and we couldn’t do that with our clients’ money, so we got out,” she said.

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“It was up fourfold in the ensuing five years from where we sold it,” she added.

“What I learned is [that] like President Trump, Musk sort of courts chaos, but you underestimate him at your peril,” Tengler said.

Tesla shares at last check were off 2.05% at $272.69.