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* Shorted SPY at $597.96 and QQQ at $526.91. (Also shorted Feb calls)

* Shorted TSLA at $448.86.

* Shorted AAPL at $256.63.

* Shorted NVDA at $140.92

* Bought more JOE at $44.71.

Charts from 10:24 a.m.:

With S&P cash +22 handles I am expanding my short exposure.

Charts from 8:24 a.m. ET:

Upside:

-CMND +103% (receives IRB Approval for its FDA-Regulated Clinical Trial)

-NEUE +63% (to go private in deal valued at $1.3B)

-JTAI +38% (launches "Ava" Agentic AI Model for Private Jet Booking)

-LAES +33% (momentum)

-TLRY +7.7% (momentum)

-INSW +7.2% (to replace CNSL in the S&P SmallCap 600 Index)

-NNE +4.9% (agrees to acquire Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp.’s Patented Micro Modular Reactor MMR and Pylon Space Reactors for $8.5M along with worldwide demonstration partnerships)

-ALTM +4.4% (obtained all requisite shareholder approvals in connection with the proposed acquisition by Rio Tinto previously announced on Oct 9th)

-AVGO +2.4% (Netflix reportedly sues VMware alleging infringement of its patents related to virtual machine technology)

-AMD +2.3% (momentum)

Downside:

-ENTA -4.1% (to appeal ruling related to ‘953 Patent Infringement Lawsuit)

-GLNG -3.2% (acquired Seatrium’s and Black & Veatch’s minority ownership interests in the FLNG Hilli for $90.2M in stock and assumed debt)

-LMNR -2.6% (earnings, guidance)

Chart from 8:45 a.m. ET:

On my investment short Winnebago WGO — price lowered to $54 at Davidson:

Keeps a Neutral rating on the shares after its Q1 earnings and revenue miss. While the company is starting to see green shoots at retail, Winnebago guided to a challenged Q2, which places increased pressure on their ability to deliver an improved earnings performance in the second half of FY25, the analyst tells investors in a research note.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to our devoted subscribers, thoughtful contributors, management and hard-working editorial staff, and best wishes for a healthy and Happy New Year.

As I pointed out yesterday, despite the yield on the 10-year Treasury above 4.6% this morning, the U.S. stock market is within hailing distance to new highs.

I, like many, will soon be in a holiday mode.

I don't have holiday presents for our scores of subscribers but here are some of my favorite Christmas and Hanukkah songs to start out the day:

* Melissa McQueen and Hot Box, "All I Want for Christmas Is Jews" (parody of the famous Mariah Carey song)

* Darlene Love, "Christmas Time for the Jews" (my favorite, "Saturday Night Live")

* Adam Sandler, "The Chanukah Song" ("Saturday Night Live")

* Steve Martin, "A Holiday Wish" ("Saturday Night Live")

* Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan and Chris Kattan, "I Wish It Was Christmas Today (Seasons Greetings From All of Us on 'Saturday Night Live')"

* Alec Baldwin, Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer, "Schweddy Balls" ("Saturday Night Live")

* Paul McCartney and Martin Short, "Holiday Pageant" ("Saturday Night Live")

* Justin Timberlake, "Cup O' Soup" ("Saturday Night Live")

* Lee Mendelson and Vince Guaraldi, "Christmas Time Is Here" ("A Charlie Brown Christmas") 

* The Christmas Groove Band's All I Want for Christmas Is... Jews (a parody of Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You)

* South Park's A Jew on Christmas

All the best!

From your going on 28 years on TheStreet Pro analyst,

Dougie Kass

* I shorted TSLA small in the premarket at $434.15.

From a smart analyst:

Tesla will end 2024 selling almost exactly the same number of cars as it did in 2023: The tiniest hair above 1.8 million. Imagine if this were any other company, let alone one of the biggest tech companies with $1+ trillion valuations. The stock would not be trading at a 200x PE, but somewhere under a 20x PE.

On the profitability line, it gets worse. From around $4 in EPS in 2023, we are now going to see a 35%-40% decline in 2023 to around $2.50 a share. Again, imagine if this was any of the other $1+ trillion tech companies. With such dramatic negative growth (think AOL in 2001), now we are talking about a 10x PE at best.

In other words, right there we have a 95% decline in the stock. This should be a $20 stock (or less), not anything near $430.

The second point is the election impact. We all know that Tesla is not trading off the aforementioned growth metrics and valuations. Clearly if investors applied those, the stock would not have been at anywhere near $250 before the election in the first place.

But here is the big contradiction: Which is the ONE company in the whole stock market that will suffer the most, economically, from Trump’s proposed policies? I think it is actually Tesla.

On Day One, Trump has promised to eliminate the so-called EV mandate. This means that automakers no longer have to subsidize their EV sales in order to meet the EV sales quotas. Fine, you say, what does that have to do with Tesla? The point that everyone -- it appears -- seems to be missing is that it means all of the regular automakers now will be able to lower the price of their gasoline cars and sell as many of them as they want. No longer do they have to price a gasoline car at $30,000 when they could otherwise sell it for $15,000. They no longer have to have fat margins on gasoline cars in order to subsidize their EVs. Once the market has adjusted for an abolition of the EV mandate, the prices on gasoline cars in the US will fall dramatically and then Tesla’s main competitor in the market won’t be the other EVs, but rather the much-cheaper gasoline cars.

EVs will then, once again, be 1% or less, of the overall car market. The automakers will be happy to give Tesla whatever large share it can subsidize itself into, of that tiny sliver of the overall car market. Mind you, Tesla only has 11% of the global EV market to begin with (1.8 million out of 16 million EVs sold world-wide).

I discussed this phenomenon in my most recent article, “The end of the eclectic car”: https://autoindustry.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-electric-car

And also, in my article “Trump confirms ending the EV mandate on January 20”: https://antonwahlman.substack.com/p/trump-confirms-abolishing-the-ev

The CNBC-driven discussion about the election impact on Tesla has an almost total focus on Congress abolishing the $7,500 per car subsidy in the upcoming budget. It is certainly true that this is a catastrophe for Tesla for the obvious reason, but it is actually peanuts in comparison with the ending of the EV mandate, which is infinitely more important for players on both sides of the equation (the EV-only companies such as Tesla, Lucid and Rivian, and the mixed gasoline/EV companies such as Ford, Toyota and VW).

Europe, you might say? Other than that Tesla’s sales in Europe have been in decline for a couple of years already, it is not unreasonable to expect that the European EV mandate may also be nearing its end. The European auto industry is in a major crisis, and the German and Italian governments are not going to stand by to see mass unemployment as this unfolds in 2025. The largest European car company -- Stellantis -- just fired its CEO three weeks ago, in part because he didn’t do enough to fight the European EV mandate. Europe is likely to move on its EV mandate within months after a US decision to do so. Europe won’t be able to look its voters in the eye and say “Americans are now suddenly paying $15,000 less per gasoline car than they did in 2024, but here in Europe we will force consumers to buy EVs that they don’t want and can’t afford, and that are causing all of our automakers to shut down plants and approach bankruptcy.”

China? It is just toying with all the foreign automakers, and this started already around year 2020. Foreign automaker sales in China are rapidly being strangled down to zero. Only via extreme price cuts, multi-year 0% financing etc, was Tesla able to keep its unit sales in China around flat in 2024. Profitability, which had been good until early 2023, has plummeted and is now likely barely above water -- all depending on how these 0% financing deals are counted (lots of short-term accounting leeway there).

There is one final thought, which is indirect but likely has stock market importance: Crypto. Tesla investors are in many cases also crypto bulls. The two assets -- Crypto (Bitcoin in particular) and Tesla -- are generally positively correlated. If a Tesla investor loses money in crypto, they are forced to liquidate Tesla stock as well.

The latest crypto nonsense is that some combination of Trump and the incoming Congress is going to order the US Treasury to buy Bitcoin. This is the new demand driver for Bitcoin. Michael Saylor and his company, Microstrategy, appears to have staked his entire future on this bet. It’s The Hunt Brothers and 1980 again, for those who remember the strange cornering of the silver market.

For the US Treasury to buy Bitcoin would be the insanest thing ever, and deeply irresponsible. If the US Treasury wanted to own a crypto “asset” it would create its own -- perhaps even a straight copy of Bitcoin, ”limiting” itself to 21 million infinitely divisible “units” -- instead of paying money to buy someone else’s crypto. Think of the seigniorage analogy, and the privilege of having one’s own reserve currency. Trump made it clear his recent BRICS tweet that he would never do anything that would hurt the US dollar. Well, if the US Treasury bought any kind of crypto -- even its own, but ESPECIALLY another crypto, such as Bitcoin -- it would tell the market that the US government does not believe in its own currency.

So, the US government would print money in order to buy Bitcoin, which would be hugely inflationary. At the same time, the US dollar would crash because of a loss in confidence. Inflation would skyrocket. We would be talking about 30% inflation in a jiffy. If there was one thing Trump might have learned from the last four years, is that high inflation topples governments. He could kiss the 2026 midterms goodbye, and any kind of a legacy with JD Vance or whomever replacing him in 2028.

Surely Trump understands this, and his various crypto czars and crypto commissions are mostly a smokescreen to keep his crypto campaign contributors minimally happy, at least in terms of the US Treasury buying any. Yes, there will be some deregulation and regulatory clarity -- is crypto a security or is it a commodity etc -- but that’s it. No catastrophic decision to actually buy Bitcoin.

Once the market realizes this, then Bitcoin likely collapses to somewhere under Microstrategy’s average purchase price, and the market has to refocus on the ticking clock in terms of when MSTR has to liquidate its Bitcoin holdings, even if it’s almost five years out. Bitcoin could crash below $10,000 in a first instance, and then the whole crypto pyramid collapses with it.

Even Sesame Street figured it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBNI5xrTXK0&t

But in any case: If Bitcoin falls dramatically when the crypto bulls realize that the US Treasury will not be buying any, then it will likely become a nasty drag on Tesla’s stock price too.

Elon Musk said in one of his Pennsylvania speeches in October 2024 that he (and/or Tesla) no longer owns any crypto, but the market still seems to implicitly assume that he does. This is why I think this correlation will backfire onto Tesla’s stock price at some unknown point in 2025.

Get ready for the ride of your life.

Merry Christmas from Puerto Rico.

* Reshorted TSLA at $434.15.

* Shorted SPY at $595.48 and QQQ at $523.89.

* Added to AAPL short at $255.45. 

Bonus — Here are some great links:

Will the Santa Claus Rally Come This Year?

It's Just 30 Stocks 

The Great Fed Debate

Does 2024 Look Like the End of the Internet Bubble?

Remember when the business media was populated by homebuilder bulls?

Nary a bear — based upon the less than 10x multiples.

Oh, wait look at the charts!

Now, look at the fundamentals!

Wolf Street howls about an impending home glut. Glut of New Completed Single-Family Houses for Sale Spikes to Highest since 2007, Prices Drop to Lowest since 2021 But Are Still Way too High | Wolf Street

Now there is nary a whisper from the bulls on housing — who do not take ownership of the fact that the stocks are now about -28% below their recent highs.

Wash, rinse, repeat. 

The S&P Short Range Oscillator stands at -7.24% vs. -7.31%.