Liam Denning, Columnist

Tesla Was Already Priced for Long-Term Perfection

Bidding up its stock on news of a possible China factory is overkill.

July 10, 2018 at 3:06 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

Already expensive.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

Tesla bulls (be they man or machine) added about $1.6 billion to the company’s market value in the first few minutes of trading Tuesday morning. Tesla Inc.’s CEO Elon Musk was reported to have secured a preliminary agreement to build a plant in Shanghai that might one day churn out 500,000 vehicles a year, effectively doubling notional capacity.

So this is just a reminder of one thing for anyone buying Tesla’s stock at Tuesday morning’s intra-day peak of $327.68: If you paid $318.51 for Tesla’s stock on Monday, you had already pretty much bought the China story. There was really no need to pay any more.