Wall Street’s weird disconnect with Tesla

Wall Street threw in the towel on Tesla Motors this week. Sort of, anyway.
Analysts’ consensus forecast for Tesla’s earnings per share in 2016 finally slipped into the red this week. A few cuts in the wake of Wednesday’s second-quarter results took the estimate from a profit of about 23 cents to a loss of about 65 cents, according to forecasts compiled by Bloomberg. Go back 18 months, and the consensus was $5.49. If history is any guide, the cuts haven’t gone far enough yet.
Despite this history of markdowns, forecasts have still tended to be too generous: Tesla has missed estimates in five of the past six annual earnings reports:
As you can see, those Excel models were especially malfunctioning over the past couple of years. Where analysts were really caught out was the rapid acceleration in Tesla’s spending to boost production of the Model S and launch new ventures such as the Model X and the Gigafactory battery facility.
A turning point of sorts was reached in February 2015, when Tesla reported that first huge miss in annual earnings and CEO Elon Musk declared on the call that Tesla was “going to spend staggering amounts of money on capex.”
The thing is, even as analysts were gutting their profit forecasts, their target valuations for Tesla stayed high — and so did the stock.
And so we end up here in the summer of 2016. Forecasts continue to fall, and Tesla continues to miss them, largely because the “staggering” spending habit has become the norm as the company’s ambition has expanded rapidly. Indeed, with expectations of near-term profits gone, the narrow foundation on which the long-term projections justifying those gravity-defying target prices rest has shrunk to Tesla’s ambition alone. The Excel models are still working in a way — you just have to keep scrolling further to the right to get to the positive numbers.
—Bloomberg View