Tesla Inc (TSLA) Shares in the Spotlight Due to Musk Comments

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is in the spotlight after CEO and founder Elon Musk responded with the following tweet to an investor group comprising of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and several other major pension funds that had asked for a more independent board at Tesla. As it stands, five of the six current board members of Tesla have either professional or personal relationships with Musk. Elon tweeted, ‘This investor group should buy Ford stock. Their governance is amazing …’. He later followed up with the tweet, ‘Besides, I already said we’d add more independent members during SCTY merger. Will announce soon, but this group has nothing to do with it’. Although Musk isn’t exactly known for his PR skills, investors are heartened that Tesla will add more independent board members. Given Musk’s reply, it certainly seems that Elon wants to retain full control of the company. Tesla investors aren’t complaining however, as shares of the stock are up substantially year-to-date under Musk’s guidance.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

According to our data, 38 top funds owned shares of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) as of the most recent 13-F reporting period, up 4 funds from the previous quarter. Together those 38 funds held 3.5% of Tesla’s long float. Meanwhile, many hedge funds are likely short. More than a quarter of Tesla’s float is on borrow.

The Bottom Line

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares are trending after Elon Musk told investors to buy Ford if they didn’t like the way things were at Tesla. For more reading, check out ‘Solar Roadways and Solar Road Panels: Debunked/Busted or A Great Idea?‘.

Disclosure:None