After a bumpy start, Tesla Inc. stock closed higher on Friday, continuing their longest winning streak in over a year and beginning a positive year for 2024.
The winning streak began on June 25, and the stock’s rise sped up earlier this week after Tesla reported surprisingly strong deliveries for the second quarter.
Friday, the stock TSLA, +2.08% closed up 2.1% to $251.52. It was the highest it had been since December 28 at $253.18. That made Tesla’s year-to-date gain 1.2%, the first time this year it has been positive.
The stock went up and down by as much as 1.6% in the first hour after the market opened.
Tesla’s stock price went up for the eighth day in a row as of Friday’s close. This is the company’s longest daily gain streak since June 13, 2023, when it went up for 13 days.
It has gained 38% in the last eight days, which is the best eight-day performance for the stock since it gained 39.6% from November 1, 2021 to now.
The market value of the company is about $802 billion right now, with about 3.2 billion shares out there. The stock hit a 15-month low of $142.05 on April 22, 2024, which was its market-cap low point. That was when the market was worth about $453 billion.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, on the other hand, thinks that Tesla’s stock can still go up a lot: He wants Tesla shares to reach $300, which is a 22% increase from where they are now.
That’s because Ives thinks Tesla’s event on August 8 about robotaxis will be a “key historical moment” for the company because it will show how serious it is about becoming a fully self-driving car company.
He is also optimistic because he thinks investors still don’t fully understand how important AI is to Tesla’s vision of a future where cars drive themselves.
Ives wrote in a note to clients, “The key for Tesla’s stock going forward is for Wall Street to realise that we think Tesla is the most undervalued AI play in the market. On August 8, [Chief Executive Elon] Musk and Tesla will have a historic Robotaxi Day that will pave the way for FSD and an autonomous future.”
In a note released Friday, TPH analysts said that they think current estimates for Tesla’s quarterly earnings will “continue to rise.” This is because they think the company will make more deliveries and store more energy.
Tesla will release its second-quarter earnings report on July 23 after the market closes.
A poll of analysts by FactSet says that the company that makes electric vehicles will report adjusted earnings of 60 cents per share on sales of $24 billion. In the second quarter of 2023, sales of $24.9 billion led to an adjusted EPS of 91 cents.
The TPH analysts said they were assuming that “higher energy-storage volumes… will meaningfully contribute to the company’s bottom line,” which means they thought the company would make 75 cents a share.
However, their predictions for 2024 deliveries are lower than what the market as a whole thinks will happen—1.74 million vehicles instead of the 2 million that the market thinks will happen.
They wrote, “Structurally, we continue to see little room for organic growth in the Model 3/Y given global penetration and stiff competition in areas like China, with the potential for tariff shifts to weigh on demand” in the second half of the year.
They said, “Our sequential growth in [the third and fourth quarters of 2024] is instead entirely driven by ramping Cybertruck volumes.”
“After earnings, all eyes will be on Robotaxi Day on 8/8, where TSLA will likely need to do more than just show off a prototype of Robotaxi to keep the momentum going,” they said.
