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NKLA - Nikola


Sunrider

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I think Jeff Ubben is still on the board, or something. 

 

At current share price the company has a market cap of around $7.5B.  Seems pretty absurd for a PR/marketing company that loses money.

 

Isn't there a big lockup expiration at the end of the year?  I'm sure insiders will be dumping shares hand over fist.

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• No debt and with only 400 employees current cash burn is about a million a month

• They should be able to wait at least a year and maybe two years before they need to raise more capital as their burn rate is only a million a month due to low employees

 

 

How did you get to $1 million / month cash burn? Their investor presentation shows the Company projecting approximately $30 million / month cash burn in 2020 and $45 million / month cash burn in 2021.

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Guest brisbane

 

• No debt and with only 400 employees current cash burn is about a million a month

• They should be able to wait at least a year and maybe two years before they need to raise more capital as their burn rate is only a million a month due to low employees

 

 

How did you get to $1 million / month cash burn? Their investor presentation shows the Company projecting approximately $30 million / month cash burn in 2020 and $45 million / month cash burn in 2021.

 

I don't even need an investor presentation to know a R&D-heavy company with no revenue and 400 employees is burning way more than $1MM per month...

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If this goes to $10 or $5 and never goes above $25 then this was a stupid move on my part.

 

Just curious, do you think the results alone dictate whether it was a good decision or not? Is there ever a situation in which you lose money, but the reasoning was sound. Conversely, is there ever a time when an investment is profitable but upon reflection unsound because of risks the investor didn't understand/etc. Or do the results alone make it a good decision or a bad decision.

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  • 5 weeks later...

It took a few weeks but I'm finally in the green in Nikola.

I always thought the GM deal would still go through. Maybe we will see the press release tonight based on the stock today.

I remember Tilson's email a week ago whereby he said GM would drop Nikola like a hot potato. Another crusade short that went wrong. Why is it that people that short stocks get so emotionally involved and not look dispassionately at the data?

Anyway, I'm happy and I wouldn't be surprised to see this north of $30 by the end of the week.

My call options are up huge!

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Guest roark33

There is no real news today, someone is circulating an old GM press release as if it is new.  GM has already come out and said the press release is old.  This is just trader noise.  Dec. 1 lock up coming hard and fast. 

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I think GM will announce soon. Even if they didn't announce I thought all of the opinions about it going under within weeks were ridiculous. $900 million in cash, no debt, all of their partners are standing by them, hydrogen is the future, we saw the cummins press release this week showing others are pursuing.

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Guest roark33

No one smart said they would go under with 900m in cash, but all the partners who have stood by are shareholders.  GM is the first non-shareholder partner that is "waiting in the wings".  GM hasn't closed the deal, why not?  Deal was supposed to close Sept 30, what is taking so long unless they are going to walk when the Dec. 3 deadline comes. 

 

Owning this in front of the Dec. 1 lock-up is crazy in my mind.  Only 80m shares in the float, but 160m new shares coming on the market, 90m from Trevor who no longer has an interest in the company. How long do you think he will wait to dump his stake.

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They already sort of did that.  The lock-up was for 290m and they extended the lock-up for 130m shares.  But, that still leaves the 160m shares who can sell.  Ubben has already distributed stock to his LPs right after that, and they can sell.  Worthington owns 7m shares still, and they will sell in the first 5 minutes of trading on Dec. 1

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Revisiting this idea today for the first time since my last post in this thread. By my count, excluding today there are six business days between now and December 1st. A few questions:

 

Insiders want to pump the stock up so that they can unload shares in early Dec. One really obvious way to do that would be to agree to whatever pound of flesh GM is demanding so that the revised deal can be announced in the very short term. Anyone have any thoughts on the game theory here?

 

 

 

Just as a housekeeping measure, can we all just agree to ignore wescobrk? His comment last month about the cash burn ("No debt and with only 400 employees current cash burn is about a million a month") was just silly, and didn't stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. I don't see any reason to engage with someone who is just going to make silly #s up.

 

 

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GM talk today all about EVs and not a single mention of Nikola

 

https://investor.gm.com/static-files/6e4732bd-c07d-43c0-80e8-9e2294b903fc

 

There is pretty zero benefit for GM to mention Nikola at this time. That's independent on whether GM goes with Nikola transaction or not.

 

I agree with Jurgis.

 

If people were buying NKLA this morning with the idea that GM was going to announce the final deal terms as part of its presentation....well, that probably wasn't a very smart bet to make.

 

 

 

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We can debate whether it would be good to talk about Nikola, but GM didn't even mention their hydrotec tech.  They mention Honda as a partner, but not Nikola. 

 

But, back to the game theory.  I still think NKLA really needs to sign some deal with GM.  GM is basically acting as forensic diligence people to confirm or refute Hindenburg's allegations.  If GM walks, they confirm, if they stay, they refute and put their stamp of approval on Nikola as "not a fraud".

 

The lock-up changes are interesting because I think it shows there is no deal.  If there was a deal, there would be no need to push the lock-up.  Assuming GM signs, stock will soar and insiders can unload their shares.  But, they kicked 136m shares till April (I assume they couldn't get the other 161m to agree). 

 

So, I think they will try to show a video of the Tre next week or Monday right before the lock-up to allow some pump to the stock.  I am really surprised that it is still this strong, but I don't think traders will over-stay their welcome in the next few days. 

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Distributed to Inclusive Capital LPs 5,134,581

Worthington Industries                 7,048,020

Trevor Milton ("M&M Residual LLC") 91,602,734

William Milton ("OTW STL LLC")         3,395,244

                                                        107,180,579

 

We know that ~161 million share have lock-up provision that expires Dec 1. Who owns the other ~53.8 million shares? How much incentive the management team have to pump the stock ahead of or at the Dec 1st date if all (or the vast majority) of its shares will still be subject to lock-up until the end of April?

 

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Guest roark33

The other portion of stock is most likely the T&M entity that is jointly owned by Trevor and Mark Russell.  I think they might save their pumping the stock bullets for when they need it.  Looking at the stock price, they don't need those bullets right now. 

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The other portion of stock is most likely the T&M entity that is jointly owned by Trevor and Mark Russell.  I think they might save their pumping the stock bullets for when they need it.  Looking at the stock price, they don't need those bullets right now.

 

I tried to warn people back in September that this slow motion train wreck might take awhile to run completely off the tracks. So why it does seem absurd that the share price has bounced back in the absence of material positive developments, I am not terribly surprised.

 

Yeah, it could be the T&M entity, but I don't know if there is any way to know that for sure. Because so many substantial shareholders have board representation (Ubben, Thompson, Iveco, Hanwha, Bosch) it isn't clear to me which entities agreed to extend lock-up and which did not.

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Isn't this a great entry point for a short position? Just wondering outloud

 

I think so yes, due to the massive # of shares that can be sold starting tomorrow. We don't know what Trevor Milton will do, but it's reasonable to expect that shareholders like Worthington will terminate their positions with extreme prejudice, and as quickly as possible.

 

Fundamentally, the company is worth zero, but there is massive reflexivity in that it can and will try to do deals using its stock as currency (this was the idea behind the GM deal). The danger is that the company announces another hare brained partnership or deal. No matter how ill-advised, the stock would probably spike upwards.

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I don't know who needs to hear this, but in the future whenever you hear "Hydrogen car"  or "Hydrogen vehicle" the words that should immediately come to mind are "fraud" and "snake oil".  It isn't just an engineering problem like with EVs, Hydrogen isn't a good idea for passenger vehicles even in theory and no fancy body style or slick powerpoint presentation is ever going to change that.

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