Tesla bulls are latching on to silver linings after the worst-ever drop in deliveries

There are a bunch of different ways to slice the Tesla delivery numbers that came out this morning. So far, traders are picking the optimistic ones.

Yes, Tesla reported its biggest drop in deliveries ever, having sold about 60,000 fewer vehicles than it did last year in Q2. And yes, the 384,000 deliveries fell short of analysts’ expectations, which have been getting revised down all quarter long. (Bloomberg’s consensus estimate was 389,000; FactSet’s was 387,000).

But the stock is up 5% today as the bulls are latching on to silver linings.

For example, Wedbush Securities analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives points out that though deliveries fell short of consensus estimates, they were better than the “whisper number” of 365,000 — the unofficial, unpublished number that Wall Street really expected.

The miss versus consensus was, overall, pretty narrow, coming in about 1% under — a narrower miss than last quarter. Here’s how deliveries have come in compared to estimates over the past few years:

As we’ve written before, Tesla often doesn’t trade on fundamentals — and that disparity might be stronger than ever.

Production also came in higher than expected, despite the company having some planned outages at its factories on the books. That could be optimistically read as the company thinking it’ll see demand tick up.

Another way to read all this? Tesla bulls are buying what CEO Elon Musk is selling. “The future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars and large scale and large volume, vast numbers of autonomous humanoid robots,” Musk said on the latest earnings call, reiterating a point he’s made again and again. In other words: don’t miss the forest (autonomy) for the trees (struggling vehicle sales).

Tesla’s small but mostly successful robotaxi launch last month in Austin is giving bulls enough hope that the future Musk is painting may actually come to pass.

As Ives wrote today, “Autonomous remains the biggest transformation to the auto industry in modern day history and in our view, Tesla will own the autonomous market in the US with the initial launch of unsupervised FSD in Austin.”

And failing everything else, maybe investors are just optimistic because Tesla’s CEO isn’t getting flamed today by the president of the United States, which caused the stock to tank yesterday.