Tesla (TSLA) could rally as media negativity is ‘increasingly immaterial’, says Baird

The media has been having a field day with Tesla crashes and Model 3 delays lately, which has affected the company’s stock.

Now Baird is out with a new note claiming that those reports are ‘increasingly immaterial’ and that the stock could rally as the market gets over it.

Baird’s auto analyst Ben Kallo wrote in a note to clients today:

Negative headlines have increased substantially in the past month and, in our opinion, increasingly immaterial reports have dominated news cycles. We think we have hit a peak in negative coverage/sentiment, and believe shares could appreciate significantly with execution, which should coincide with an improvement in sentiment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently criticized the media on how they report on Tesla crashes.

As we have shared, those news reports have fed people with short interests in Tesla’s stock and Musk warned people betting against Tesla of a ‘next level short burn of the century’.

The CEO even bought $10 million worth of Tesla stock just after he predicted a short squeeze.

Ben Kallo is one of a few Wall Street analysts who approves of Tesla as an investment these days.

With the new note today, he reiterated an outperform rating and a $411 price target on Tesla’s stock.

Kallo is ranked #708 out of 4,799 Analysts on TipRanks (#1,055 out of 11,276 overall experts) with a 58% success rate and 8% average return.

He has a long history of recommending Tesla’s stock:

Electrek’s Take

I have to agree with Baird here. I have been increasingly bummed out by the media’s coverage of Tesla.

Not only with the obsessive coverage of crashes trying to link what are mostly driver mistakes to Tesla Autopilot or risk of battery fires, but also a general increase of misleading clickbait.

I recently pointed out Bloomberg’s horrible coverage of the introduction of the Performance Model 3:

Bloomberg @business wasn't sure which headline was more misleading clickbait about @Tesla Model 3 so they went with both: pic.twitter.com/xIlePbggPI

— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) May 21, 2018

Wow nevermind, they had a third one and it was even worse: pic.twitter.com/0BIsxc3oSO

— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) May 21, 2018

Those articles are about the new Model 3 performance version, yet you wouldn’t know at all from those headlines, which set the tone for the rest of the article.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.