Analyst Steers Clear of Tesla Stock

With a consensus price target of $276.67 per share, the potential upside on shares of Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) at Monday’s closing price of $196.94 is just over 40%. Does that make the stock a value or a value trap?

Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brad Erikson said in a research note cited Tuesday morning at MarketWatch that his firm “remains suspicious of underlying demand and would continue to avoid” Tesla stock. To underline his conclusion, Erikson raised his estimated quarterly loss by a penny to $1.10 per share for 2015 and cut his 2016 earnings estimate by nearly two-thirds, from $0.67 to $0.27.

Orders for the recently introduced Model X continue to trail expectations, and a promotional discount of 20% on the lease cost of the Model S failed to boost sales. That leaves the March introduction of the Model 3 to carry a lot of weight going forward.

And Erikson is not alone. A blog post from Liam Denning at Bloomberg examines the price target cut on Tesla stock issued Monday by Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, who cut his price target from $450 per share to $333 while maintaining the firm’s Overweight rating on the stock. Jonas had a put a price target of $465 on Tesla stock in mid-August, a jump of 66% from the previous $280 target.
[recirclink id=312438]
That huge jump was based on a planned service called Tesla Mobility using self-driving cars as a sort of uber-Uber service. Denning cuts to the chase:

If you want a good definition of froth, a price target jumping by two-thirds largely due to expectations around businesses that either barely exist or don’t at all, and then being cut by almost 30 percent all in the space of less than six months is a pretty good candidate. Even now, a quarter of Morgan Stanley’s new target for Tesla relates to upside in the storage business and launching a successful robo-vehicle venture.

Erikson and Denning have injected a dose of reality into the price of Tesla’s stock, and investors are not liking what the picture reveals. Shares traded down more than 5% early Tuesday, at $191.88 in a 52-week range of $181.40 to $286.65.