TSLA stock has been in freefall lately, although it appears it has at least stabilized on Tuesday after sustaining its worst fall in months last week. On Friday, TSLA stock was the NASDAQ 100’s second-worst performer, and the correction continued on Monday. Early Tuesday morning, it looked like a key perma-bull had rescued TSLA stock from its steady downtrend, but by Tuesday afternoon, bulls saw that hope evaporate… until the next cycle upward a bit later, that is.
In a note to investors this morning, Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) analyst Adam Jonas said he expects there to be 10 times as many Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) cars on the road five years from now. A closer read of his note reveals why it wasn’t enough to boost TSLA stock. Jonas has liked the company for years, and it seems purely driven by his opinion rather than any hard numbers.
According to him, the Model 3 launch will triple the number of Tesla cars on the road within the next two years. He predicts that there will be almost 300,000 Teslas on the road by the end of this year and 531,000 by the end of next year. By early 2023, he predicts there will be 10 times as many Tesla cars on the road as there will be at the end of this year, and then by 2040, he expects there to be almost 32 million Tesla cars on the road, or 107 times as many as there will be on the roads at the end of this year.
Needless to say, if he’s right, TSLA stock will really take off, but of course only time will tell if he’s right or not. Surely few predicted Google’s or Amazon’s rise to where they are now, so it will take years before we know whether Tesla will experience exponential growth of the size Jonas predicts.
He noted that word-of-mouth advertising will be huge for Tesla, and he’s probably right about this because of how well the company did without dropping a single penny on advertising. The automaker has made itself such a spectacle that anyone who has heard of it turns their heads when they see a Tesla car going down the road, and this may become even truer after the company releases its electric truck. Jonas also pointed out that friends and neighbors may turn out to be the best salespeople for the automaker, and it doesn’t even have to pay them. Indeed, there’s little need to go to a Tesla store if he’s right about the exponential growth because the cars will come to us.
TSLA stock has been highly volatile today, which may lead some to wonder whether today is a taste of what is to come. In a post for Investopedia, portfolio manager Michael Kramer said that options pricing pointed to continued volatility in TSLA stock in the coming months. He said the market was pricing in almost an 18% change in either direction by January.
TSLA stock was up 052% at $346.61 at the time of this writing.