Tesla will open 11 new stores across the United States, the company said in a tweet. Four of these will be in California, two in Texas, two in Florida, and one each in Delaware, North Carolina, and New York.
In a report on the news, Electrek’s Fred Lambert noted that all 11 locations are in malls, which is a departure from traditional car selling, but Tesla has proved it’s good at being different and benefiting from it.
This is not the first push of Tesla into malls, Lambert recalls. It opened its first stores in malls between 2010 and 2013 under the leadership of George Blankenship, who also led Apple’s retail marketing strategy earlier this decade.
Tesla, the most shorted stock in the history of the U.S. stock market, reported its first-ever quarterly profit for July-September 2018, which sent its shares soaring. The company is currently the third-largest carmaker in terms of market capitalization, behind only Volkswagen and Toyota.
In the past three months Tesla’s stock has gained 37 percent, according to a recent CNBC report, and the company has become the best performer in the Nasdaq 100. However, more gains could be on the way as the risk of a short squeeze continues growing until the bubble bursts.
“The shorts are getting fairly nervous, the short interest ratio has been falling since about the April time frame,” the chief marketing technician of Piper Jaffray told CNBC. “If we get a close above this $390 level, it’s going to suggest a topside breakout with a measured price objective based on the charts perhaps about $525 to $550.”
Short interest on Tesla stands at 22 percent of its stocks, CNBC noted, down from the record-high of 31 percent this April as the company struggled with delays in the mass production of its Model 3, but still quite high.
Now, with the company growing its retail network and announcing Model 3s actually available for immediate delivery, breaking the US$390 level, which would be a new record, might not be as impossible as it would have seemed a few months ago. If that happens, it would be quite a short squeeze indeed.
