The shares of Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) are trading higher after the company announced record second quarter deliveries in the current fiscal year. Its shares advanced by 4.14% in the pre-market trading and appreciated by around 3% in the first hours of trading. The electric carmaker doesn’t release monthly automobile sales figures and rather prefers a quarterly reporting model. According to a statement, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) delivered 11,507 Model S vehicles in the second quarter of 2015, up by 52% on the year. At the same time, this is the best quarter for the company in terms of deliveries. Despite the record deliveries achieved last quarter, Tesla still has to put more effort to achieve CEO Elon Musk’s target of 55,000 annual deliveries.
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Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s stock has advanced by 21.11% year-to-date and things are working out for the company. Last week, one of the Nevada’s economic officials said that Tesla’s Gigafactory is likely to be operational within a year from now, which is sooner than the company’s expectations. Once ready, this factory will be the largest in the world with an area of 5.8 million square feet and it will be used for the production of lithium-ion batteries.
With a record quarter and a growing stock price, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) seems to be a promising stock, but relying solely on market conditions is a risky investment strategy. At Insider Monkey, we follow around 700 hedge funds and among them, 29 funds had Tesla’s stock in their portfolio at the end of March, against 25 hedge fund investments in the previous quarter. At the same time, 17 hedge funds in our database held ‘Put’ positions underlying shares of the electric carmaker at the end of the first quarter.
Why are we interested in the 13F filings of a select group of hedge funds? We use these filings to determine the top 15 small-cap stocks held by these elite funds based on 16 years of research that showed their top small-cap picks are much more profitable than both their large-cap stocks and the broader market as a whole. These small-cap stocks beat the S&P 500 Total Return Index by an average of nearly one percentage point per month in our backtests, which were conducted over the period of 1999 to 2012. Moreover, since the beginning of forward testing from August 2012, the strategy worked just as our research predicted, outperforming the market every year and returning 135% over the last 32 months, which is more than 80 percentage points higher than the returns of the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) (see more details).
Over the last 12 months, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) has gained 12.59% share value making it an excellent bet for investors. When we look at insider activity surrounding the stock, we see that several directors and executives sold shares of the company in the first six months of 2015. Among them, Jeffery Straubel, Chief Technology Officer at Tesla Motors Inc, sold 20,000 shares of the electric automobile manufacturer in the past six months. Jerome Guillen, Vice President service and sales operations at Tesla Motors, is another insider who sold 17,750 shares of the company during the same period.
With all of this in mind, let’s go over the fresh action encompassing Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA).
What have hedge funds been doing with Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)?
When looking at the hedgies followed by Insider Monkey, Andor Capital Management, led by Daniel Benton, holds the largest position in Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), which contains 1.00 million shares valued at $188.77 million, comprising 18.7% of its 13F portfolio. Sitting at the second spot is John Thaler’s JAT Capital Management, which owns 733,700 shares.
The shares of Tesla are growing at a healthy rate and with record deliveries for the last quarter, things are turning out well for the company, which is why we recommend buying shares of the company.
Disclosure: None
