We recently published a list of 10 Stocks Everyone is Talking About After Trump’s New Tariffs. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) stands against other stocks everyone is talking about after Trump’s new tariffs.
Countries are beginning to react to President Donald Trump’s new reciprocal tariffs and analysts believe things might not go according to the White House’s expectations, with American workers and consumers likely to see the impact of new duties.
Fred Kempe from Atlantic Council said in a latest program on CNBC that many countries can impose strong retaliatory tariffs against the US.
“I think we have to recognize what’s going to be implemented is going to be the highest effective tariff rate since the 1930s. What also happened in the 1930s is you had new trading blocks, you had new trading partners finding their way to each other, and you could find that that happens as well. And let’s not forget what also happened in the 1930s afterwards. We hope that’s not going to happen now, but, um, you know, a trade war just really never serves, in the end, global stability, global peace.”
Kempe said investors failed to realize that Trump does not “care” about falling stock prices as he is looking to change the global trade system.
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For this article, we picked 10 stocks Wall Street analysts are talking about. With each stock, we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
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Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 99
Tom Narayan, RBC Capital Markets global autos analyst, said in a latest program on CNBC that he cut Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) price target amid rising competition in the full self-driving space. Narayan slashed his price target for the EV maker by $120 to $320.
“What changed is we’ve had a lot of discussions with different management teams at OEMs. We just had Mercedes on the road last week talking about their level two, level three plus autonomy product. We had Aptiv at CES, and a number of companies talked about how they view autonomy as a me-too product for brand differentiation, rather than pricing it as a profit center. We also heard about BYD’s God Eye product, where they’re trying to make it standard on lower models. When we look at all that, we consider Tesla FSD. We initially thought they would be at $100 a month pricing down the road. Now we’re thinking this may be more of a commoditized product as other car companies offer this. Let’s drop this to $50 a month, which we think is more realistic.”
Tesla’s EV sales are falling all over the world as the company faces challenges from competitors. For example, in California, the largest U.S. market for electric vehicle adoption and sales, Tesla sales fell about 12% year over year in 2024, causing its market share to drop from 60.1% in 2023 to 52.5% in 2024. Was it because Californians are buying fewer EVs? No. Californians purchased more than 2 million electric cars during the year, almost double when compared to the past two years.
Things aren’t looking good for Tesla in Europe, either. For example, in Germany, Tesla delivered just 1,429 new cars in February, down 76% from the same month last year. In contrast, battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations surged 30.8% during the month.
Tesla Inc’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) product lineup is showing signs of stagnation, with over 95% of sales still coming from the Model 3 and Model Y. Meanwhile, competitors are rolling out more advanced models. According to Reuters, Tesla’s market share in Europe is slipping as legacy automakers like BMW post stronger sales. Chinese competitor BYD is also gaining ground in Europe, despite talk of tariffs.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“The largest relative detractors in the quarter were Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) (not owned), Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Broadcom (not owned). We’ve spoken at length about our rationale for not owning Tesla. The stock enjoyed a 54% return during the quarter, with effectively all of the share price performance strength coming in the post-election period, as the market expressed a positive view on Elon Musk’s prominent role in the incoming Trump administration and its potential implications for Tesla. While we agree this development should be a net positive for Tesla and recognize the company’s interesting future prospects for autonomous driving and humanoid robots, its current valuation demands that shareholders pay primarily for potential innovations that have yet to materialize, with uncertain risks and timelines, presenting a different type of risk profile than we are comfortable with. Today, Tesla is an automobile manufacturer limited to the higher-income segment and is increasingly challenged to sell vehicles when interest rates are not zero. As such, we continue to question the company’s long-term growth profile, its ability to scale a large robotaxi service (which seems to be the source of euphoria in Tesla shares), and its corporate governance.”
Overall, TSLA ranks 3rd on our list of best mid cap growth stocks. While we acknowledge the potential of TSLA, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than TSLA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.