16 ms·
Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but it is amazing to me how differently various publications are spinning the same basic facts. Some headline samples: "T
by nyczomg 7y ago
Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but it is amazing to me how differently various publications are spinning the same basic facts. Some headline samples:
"Tesla shares soar after crushing third-quarter earnings" CNBC
"Tesla's Quarterly Profit Drops 54%" WSJ
"Tesla returns to profitability and tops Wall Street's third-quarter earnings" Business Insider
"Tesla ekes out a profit as all eyes turn to its China Gigafactory" The Verge
I get that financials are prone to much speculation, interpretation, etc. But it seems that the news is so agenda driven today that we're twisting facts to fit some narrative rather than the other way around.
When the narratives being pushed at us by news organizations are so polarized around concrete numbers being reported at regular intervals in a heavily regulated manner, how can we hope to interpret more nuanced news appropriately?
Sorry, rant over. This is exciting news for Tesla! Or maybe the beginning of the end.
- Franciscouzo 7y agoWhy the need to add "today", has news ever been any different in that regard?
- slg 7y agoPart of the problem is that the Internet has resulted in lots of these news outlets simply trying to be first on a story and then editing articles in real time. For example, that negative WSJ headline doesn't appear to exist anymore and now their article on the subject it titled "Tesla Holds Down Expenses, and Its Shares Surge" with the 54% number relegated to a subheading. Odds are that article will continue to be edited for days and will have a variety of different headlines in that time.
- user5994461 7y agoBet there are always multiple headlines and they're A/B tested for the most views.
- jaimex2 7y agoCry wolf enough times and you just start getting ignored though. I can't say I ever click on any Business Insider or the Verge articles anymore regardless of title.
- m00x 7y agoThis only makes sense of people who do enough research to realize it's false information. A lot of people just care if the headline fits their own narrative. If people would ignore fake news, we wouldn't have so much misinformation issues, people biting the onion and flat earthers.
- sh87 7y agoIt would be awesome to have a reference list of examples to demonstrate how twisted headlines from major sources really are. Any come to mind?
- paulpauper 7y agoVerge has anti big tech bias. anti amazon anti Tesla, anti anything or anyone that is big and successful or rich.
- xkjkls 7y agoReally? I'd say the opposite. They love tech. That's the bread and butter of what they cover. Any anti-articles are due to the fact that that is almost all they cover.
- ameen 7y agoThe Verge and other Vox publications definitely do push an anti-tech angle is it's digestible by the populace.
- GCA10 7y agoActually (WSJ alum here) our long-ago training was to lead the story with the percentage change in net income, no matter what. The assumption was that in a congested world, that was more likely to be the most useful metric. And it was a simple, easy-to-find number. Focusing on net income was meant to keep inexperienced reporters from being bamboozled by IR/PR departments that sometimes went to crazy lengths to find something positive in the midst of a crummy report. (One tech company with dwindling sales, profit and market share liked to talk about its strong cash position.) Of course, that was in the days before up-to-the-second updates on after-hours trading. So now reporters know the market's verdict within a few minutes of the earnings release. That leads to financial-results stories that hunt for something (earnings? revenue? next quarter outlook?) that explains the stock movement. In this environment, different metrics get different levels of prominence all the time. I wouldn't burn up a lot of energy coming up with conspiratorial reasons why reporters pick different numbers. Inexperience and confusion usually are the simple reasons for 90% of strange decisions. This is probably true in a lot of areas.
- xkjkls 7y agoNot usually -- most of these articles end up being consumed very quickly after publication, so A/B testing wouldn't yield any actionable data.
- paxys 7y agoBest to look at the earnings release itself to get the most objective picture. Or if you want a single metric, look at the after-hours stock movement. TSLA is up 20%, so it can't all be bad news.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago> Or if you want a single metric, look at the after-hours stock movement. I think this is a good rule of thumb, but for famously volatile securities (Tesla, Bitcoin, etcetera) you are really just swimming in a sea of irrational exuberance and nobody knows how it's going to end. Maybe Tesla will be the world's richest company in 10 years. Maybe Tesla will go bankrupt in 2. I don't know, but looking at Tesla stock trends doesn't tell you anything other than how unstable it is.
- AznHisoka 7y agoAlso short term stock movements, especially after earnings can be due to Keynesian beauty contests. you think other people think the headline is positive. even if you think the actual results are bad, you still buy because the price is dictated by the greater fools, not you.
- paulpauper 7y agoyeah there is randomness but the companies that tend to go away often have a fatal flaw, such as being dependent on a single customer, or are fads, or have cut throat competition and tiny margins. This is why clothing companies are such bad investments compared to information tech. Tesla has none of those problems.
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoME: It's not a good idea to look at stock trends for anything super volatile. YOU: Tesla doesn't have problems like other stocks. How is this relevant?
- xkjkls 7y agoAfter Hours can be low volume and not entirely indicative. The full next day of trading is usually a much more sober indicator.
- zaroth 7y agoAnd you know what? All the headlines are true! Knowing which takeaways matter is the hard part, and particularly with investing, if you did know, you’d be very rich. I think the YoY EPS is the least interesting and more erratic headline personally. They had one prior profitable quarter which happened to be Q3 2018. That was under a full subsidy regime only selling the highest ASP Model 3s while there was still higher volume X/S sales to boot. All eyes are definitely on G3. Tesla spent 2019 improving process efficiency and returning to profitability but have been seriously production limited the last two quarters. G3 production coming online for China, also by the way just in time to avoid a steep rise in import tariffs, is hugely critical for Tesla, and China as a long term EV market is absolutely massive. Getting China excited about a locally built Tesla is super important, and G3 production of 3k units/wk by the end of the year should be a massive boost to their bottom line, because those should be higher margin units even if they are somewhat lower ASP than their global average. It’s definitely not the beginning of the end for Tesla and I don’t think anyone should come away from this particular report feeling more pessimistic about TSLA than they were going into it.
- gok 7y ago> They had one prior profitable quarter which happened to be Q3 2018 Both Q3 and Q4 2018 were profitable, and so was Q3 2016, and Q1 2013.
- zaroth 7y agoDamn I should have known that. You hear so many deride Tesla over and over I internalized the “they were profitable for one damn quarter” and took it as fact. March, 2013 - $ 11.5M September, 2016 - $ 21.88M September, 2018 - $311M December, 2018 - $139M September, 2019 - $143M
- mikorym 7y agoIn terms of being profitable or not a quarter, can't you use accounting techniques to twist this? I know that you can play off assets that still need to be paid as income. Or is the meaning always precise? For example, the first two don't say much; the third is much more significant and probably difficult to fake. Personally, I think the most important is whether they can follow their game plan: make a lot of debt for car n, pay all off plus make a little; restart for car n+1. Also, n+1 should sell more units than n.
- LeftHandPath 7y agoThis is why you just go to the [EDGAR files](https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml https://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) and think on your own. If you want entertainment, read the interpretation given by a news organization with your preferred bias. If you want real insight, read articles with conflicting agendas. I suggest Barrons and WSJ as the obvious conservative-agenda choices, and Bloomberg and Financial Times as liberal-agenda choices.
- Barrin92 7y agonot to diminish the effort of reading different viewpoints but I have to chuckle about the fact that we live in times were the ideological spectrum spans the astonishing distance from the Wall Street Journal on the one side to the Financial Times on the other
- pmart123 7y agoDon’t worry, each one will wrote the opposing headline tomorrow to close the loop.
- c3534l 7y agoThe financials themselves are the facts, everything else written about it is interpretation and punditry.
- gruglife 7y agoIt's all noise. Read the 10q and and decide for yourself.
- xkjkls 7y ago10-Q isn't released until weeks later
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoOne of these headlines will A/B test to win viewership and ad revenue. The actual facts do not matter; they're optimizing for colorful and exciting headline. To get clicks, they'll make the headline seem extremely positive or negative, as neutral is uninteresting.
- lutorm 7y agoEvery piece of market news that says "market change X, because incident Y" is pure speculation since there is no way to establish Y as the cause. I wish they would just say "X happened, and also Y" and stop thinking they can attribute cause and effect.
- andrewbinstock 7y ago>Every piece of market news that says "market change X, because incident Y" is pure speculation since there is no way to establish Y as the cause. This is not correct. There are many market news items that can be directly attributed to another event. Boeing's numbers this week are directly attributable to the Max fiasco. The company and analysts agree on this. Why would you assert that it's "pure speculation."
- xkjkls 7y agoI mean, he's right that correlation =/= causation, but you're definitely right that there's a lot of times the link between the two are pretty obvious
- lutorm 7y agoFair, if it's a specific stock and a specific event affecting that company, I don't have so much of a quibble with that (although it could still well be that 0.2 of that selloff is because of the event and the remaining 0.8 is because the first 0.2 sold.) I'm more thinking of the "Markets are down 1% today because of uncertainty associated with the China trade"-style reports.
- ryuukk_ 7y agomost of them are $TSLA investors, i invite you to report them to the IRS
- moneytide1 7y agoIt's up 20% after market though. Inflection point reached? Now it's a matter of organizing the momentum.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Angostura 7y agoA couple of sentences from the BBC story that probably explain what's going on: > The firm also reported an unexpected profit of $143m (£110.7m) for the three months to 30 September. That beat forecasts, but was down more than 50% from a year earlier.
- partingshots 7y agoThe most effective method of manipulation is by selectively highlighting parts of the truth while purposely obscuring other portions. That’s why it’s so important to not passively intake information but be aware of and actively introspect when doing so.
- bradgessler 7y agoOne big reason I built https://legiblenews.com/ https://legiblenews.com/, which scrapes Wikipedia’s news once a day for headlines, is because their agenda is to be encyclopedic. The headlines link to encyclopedia articles (except for the sources obviously) where if clicked, people might accidentally learn something.
- xkjkls 7y agoWikipedia has its own enormous biases; it's editor population is enormously white, male, and American. That changes the filter of what they believe to be notable.
- Yizahi 7y agoI don't see a realistic way to include every social group of human, proportionally to their impact. This is enormous task. And if we could - would you read news that has 20% content praising chairman Winnie-the-Pooh Xi? Because that's what proportional system would bring. Or 20% news about benefits of peasful islam. If whole country pushes certain narrative would it make the truth due to sheer number of supporters? PS: I'm not saying that WASP news are unbiased.
- xkjkls 7y agoWhat I'm saying is that we should not take Wikipedia as some paragon of unbiased news. Your editor population determines the content that is published, critiqued and updated. They might have better standards than many online edited sources, but they are far from lacking bias.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoIf a human was involved, it was biased.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoNote WSJ changed their headline to "Tesla Delivers a Surprising Profit" (the URL still has the old headline): https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-quarterly-profit-drops-54-11571866532 https://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-quarterly-profit-drops-5...
- xkjkls 7y agoI mean, all of these are true. WSJ's quarterly profit decline is probably the least accurate headline. To be honest, the fact that they have a YoY revenue decline is much more significant.