Trader who successfully shorted Tesla into earnings now sets sights on this high flyer
Here's what's trending across India right now:
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Adding to this, The bearish Tesla set-up we flagged ahead of Wednesday's report has delivered most of what it can. Two ways forward: bank the entire gain, or press the same playbook against another priced-for-perfection name reporting in two weeks.
Meanwhile, Heading into Tesla 's second-quarter report, I argued the risks were skewed to the downside. Greeting a delivery beat with selling was a classic tell of expectations "priced for perfection." While revenue of $28.2 billion beat handily, up 26% year over year, adjusted earnings of 34 cents per share missed the consensus (50 cents) by a wide margin. Operating margin compressed to 1.4%, and a 142% surge in capital spending swung free cash flow negative. Combining disappointing EPS, a call for patience (this is the pattern with Tesla) on robotaxi, and the stock slid roughly 14.5% Thursday, through our short put strike, and closed near the move targeted by the trade. Investors are apparently more interested in the "show" rather than the "tell" in Tesla earnings.
Notably, Which brings us to the less glamorous but more important part of trading: what to do when a position works. Our bearish structure has captured the bulk of its maximum potential value. When most of the possible profit is already in hand, the math flips against you — what's left to earn is small relative to what you'd give back if the stock snaps back (a possibility I consider quite unlikely). So that leaves us with a couple reasonable paths:
As per the latest buzz, Path one: take the money and run. Close the position, book the gain, and wait for another fat pitch. There is never anything wrong with this. There's an old saw in investing: "One never loses money taking profits." Platitudinous admittedly, but we'll reserve a more nuanced approach for another day.
In further updates, Path two: bank most of it, and press. Make a similar play with "house money". Somewhat emboldened, redeploy a portion of the profits toward another high-multiple pioneering company whose valuation and price action make it vulnerable to disappointment: Palantir , which reports August 3rd.
On top of that, Palantir is a remarkable company, one of my favorites actually. But several counterpoints deserve weight heading into the print. The shared ambition to grow revenues tenfold without scaling the sales force is, to put it charitably, ambitious. Competition among LLM providers is likely to intensify, and enterprise customers increasingly look to deploy large language models directly rather than through an intermediary platform. The total addressable market, while large, is finite — and international sales are likely to be constrained by the understandable preference for local vendors wherever national security is concerned.
The numbers, while good, were less good last quarter. Commercial backlog growth slowed to 12% in the first quarter, per Bloomberg, down from 21% in the fourth quarter of 2025. And even net of its recent declines, Palantir trades at a material premium to its software peer group — and well above its own historical EV/sales average.
Source: CNBC