Comment by malshe
1 day ago
I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.
> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.
> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.
> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.
Warren Buffett’s fund exits BYD after a 17-year investment that grew over 20-fold in value - https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/investing/warren-buffet-berks... - September 22nd, 2025
This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?
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That investment predates Xi Jinping's leadership.
> Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners.
But in practice, wouldn't such an event on X large Chinese company have a cascade effect on stock values of all other Chinese companies?
Maybe, but China might not care too much.
They have precedence for cutting down their tech giants and their tuition industry recently.
Isn't BYD a VIE? Most "internet" (ie tech) companies in China cannot legally be owned by foreigners. And what you get is some proxy based in the Cayman Islands that is circumventing Chinese law. Not something I'd touch with a ten foot pole.
The VIE structure has been officially ratified by the highest levels of regulators in China. It does not circumvent Chinese law.
> What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
If your hypothetical happens, yes. China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.
And are they making progress? Genuine question, I don't know much about China.
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> Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners
See TikTok as an example.
The future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access the global capital markets, which means that by extension, its future depends on foreign investors being demonstrably "allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies".
Funnily enough, the future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access their local market. The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
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In the combination Keynesian Beauty Contest[1] and casino that passes for an equity market in the US, everyone knows that Tesla is ugly as hell, but everyone also knows that everyone knows that it will get votes, so the show goes on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
Only works until it doesn't.
Or until they have enough power and influence to hack the government so the money flow will never end
What do you mean by 'everyone'? Tesla usually has quite a bit of short interest.
I like this quote from Dan Wang's 2025 letter:
> Part of the reason that China’s stock market trends sideways is that everyone’s profits are competed away. Big Tech might enjoy the monopolistic success smiled upon by Peter Thiel, coming almost to genteel agreements not to tread too hard upon each other’s business lines. Chinese firms have to fight it out in a rough-and-tumble environment, expanding all the time into each other’s core businesses, taking Jeff “your margin is my opportunity” Bezos with seriousness.
https://danwang.co/2025-letter/
Is that a fancy way of saying “communist” China has real, authentic capitalism and “capitalist” US has monopolies all over?
I am a China perma bull and a panda hugger but most of my money is in the US.
US capital is the completely dominant center of global capital and it will be so for decades to come. Ultimately this will flip too as China becomes the global economic center but I am not quite sure what it will look like and I don't assume the process of capital allocation will be exactly the same as it is today in the US-system (there may be more state directed investment, more bank lending, perhaps less public speculation, or even novel financial structures).
That said - Chinese stocks had a good year in 2025 and are currently on a run - and there is certainly a lot of value there.
This is the story of nearly every Chinese stock ever. Their market is very different and even simple intuitions don't carry over.
Anytime China targets an industry we get a situation where basically every major city has their own brand that they're backing. There's a lot more competition in China compared to western markets that tend to be dominated by a few major players. There's over 100 EV brands in China today, e.g. BYD (Shenzhen), NIO (Hefei), GAC Aion (Guangzhou), and SAIC (Shanghai)
There's been a lot written about China's "Fiscal Federalism"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...
Very good point. People often ignore how important monopolies are to high stock prices. A monopoly can extract more wealth from the market than if there's strong competition.
A competitive market destroys revenue potential, essentially forcing companies to constantly reduce margins or innovate. Both of which are very good for the consumer, but these companies need to run harder to stay in the same place.
I've heard that for example, NIO is facing fiscal troubles, since their business model was that they sell somewhat nicer cars for more money, however everything they come out with tends to be quickly incorporated by the competition at a lower price point.
I also want to add that this internal competition is why stories about huge government subsidies is bull - there's a huge amount of domestic competitors at each other's throats, and the Chinese government certainly doesn't want to pick winners, so the only way to subsidize cars is to subsidize demand, which means that all those subsidies are available to foreign companies doing business in China.
Most of those pronounces have greater than 50 million people. Anhui has 60 million, guangdong has 127 million. Shanghai only has 26 million people as a city. The federalism exists because the numbers China is working with are huge. It’s not some small podunk town in North Carolina deciding to make cars, it’s a province on par with that have a populous country. We can’t judge China based on a much smaller scale of US states and cities.
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They usually go through a major, government driven consolidation phase to establish a handful of national champions. I would bet we’ll see the same in EVs. This ensures scale by which they can dominate the global industry-an explicit target of the CCP.
Weren’t US industries like this before the huge consolidation we saw towards the end of the 20th century?
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How they do financial bailouts by printing their own debt-free money and having fine-grained control of the banking system is also something that the west doesn't do.
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Can you even own Chinese stock as a foreigner? I thought Chinese 'stock' was essentially 'IOU's held by a foreign third party who holds it on your behalf. I would not trust a significant amount of money to such a scheme.
it’s not very hard to trade directly on the hong kong stock exchange.
https://www.investasian.com/stock-market/hong-kong-brokerage...
BYD does not make most of its revenue on BEVs. It is mostly batteries and more plugin hybrids than BEVs and they lose money selling BEVs (less than almost all other electric car makers though). Tesla make only BEVs and make a profit doing so (the only? large maker to consistently do so).
I believe Tesla's profits are from carbon credits, not vehicle sales.
They have positive gross margin and net margin. That's not ZEV credits.
Tesla was only profitable the last few quarters due to selling their carbon credits to other companies. They'd have lost money otherwise. And since Trump basically did away with that, Tesla is no longer a profitable company now.
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
Also, their market position has already been factored in by market participants with multiple orders of magnitude greater capital and access to information about the company than you do. Thats not to say the market valuation is accurate, but it does mean that you guessing which way the market has mis-valued the stock is a coin flip.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
But as another comment pointed out, they have tons of debt, and TFA states that their "revised" target was revised downward, meaning earlier stock valuations were priced for higher sales.
No AI, self driving hype in BYD
BYD's self-driving is free and much more widely available. Not to mention it uses LiDAR. I'm not gonna get into whether or not their God's Eye is better or worse than Tesla's FSD but it's at least widely acknowledged that they are at least comparable.
Tesla is also not very transparent so it's hard to cite statistics but a recent study found that Tesla had the highest rate of fatal accidents of any brand in the US
https://www.iseecars.com/most-dangerous-cars-study
One of the things that got him in trouble with the authorities was publicly stating that he thought Tesla stock is overvalued.
For the major part BYD sales performance is dependent on government subsidies in the country where they sell three quarters of all the cars they produce. That is a high risk factor investors don't like.
Can you provide a source for the government subsidies you say BYD is dependent on?
Here's the recent news on that: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/china-...
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It’s stock manipulation.
I could give you many reasons. I see where you went wrong, here are some to think about:
- next time don't just look at stock value and volume. Look at cashflow
- Consider that most investment volume comes from institutional investors in Wall Street, not in China. Even Chinese investment is routed through NY, Singapore, UK, etc, with the slight exception of Hong Kong.
- Consider geopolitics before investing too. Trump really went all-in in tariffs that basically geofence EV business to american brands.
- The hope for BYD is in EU and UK markets. EU has also been extremely harsh to welcoming BYD and protectionist of their (German) auto makers. This hasn't avoided BYD entering the market, but also has stopped them from shipping en masse. Might change.
- BYD is not a competitor to Tesla. BYD market is the low end market mostly. For example, what today in EU is Dacia (1st or 2nd best seller by number of units). Tesla on the other hand is purposely set up as a mid-high seller. It is too expensive for the cheap segment of the market (10-20k) and is well below luxury vehicles. Different market segment, also better margins in that segment.
- Auto industry is cyclical not defensive. In times of economic uncertainty like today, if you want a solid investment you should look at defensive not cyclical.
- Generally it is a bad idea for retailers to invest in Chinese HQed companies due to the complex geopolitics that surrounding the stock. For example, you have severe limitations in stock market products and they have tight regulation, unlike the US where you have a free-market.
- Consider the market of derivatives. Very different market of futures in China vs the US.
- Tesla is also a self-driving company and robotics company. It would be better compared to XPENG than to BYD.
- Tesla owns the EV market in North America. Period. This is the reality today.
- On top of all that yes the stock is hyped up. But you should know that and invest with that in mind. Being full blown rational in an irrational market will not work.
> - The hope for BYD is in EU and UK markets. EU has also been extremely harsh to welcoming BYD and protectionist of their (German) auto makers. This hasn't avoided BYD entering the market, but also has stopped them from shipping en masse. Might change.
The way this will change is Chinese companies opening factories in the EU. BYD is opening one in Szeged, Hungary soon.
your very mistake was trading stocks at all
stocks and the whole money-as-a-business is US thing - making actual product is the China thing
Chinese stocks don’t seem to follow any reality either. BYD is basically flat over 5 years.
The explanation that I'm finding more and more compelling is that this is because there's actual competition in China, whereas in the west conglomerates have been able to carve up the market into fiefdoms and feast, with increasing amounts of cash that they can funnel into dividends and buybacks.
From the NA vehicle POV it doesn't look healthy. Stocks of the major auto makers have done well this year, while product gets more and more expensive and limited. Barely seems possible to buy anything but a F150like anymore.
Western corporations optimise for share price. The way to do that is by pulling strings at the government level to block your competitors and by getting nice tax breaks; not by having the best product for the consumer.
China and Chinese companies still want to shake off the "China means bad quality" image, so they actually want to make a great product at a good price for the consumer. To-the-moon share price growth doesn't happen by giving your customers a good deal.
Also the CCP doesn't want corporations forgetting who calls the shots, so there is some internal pressure keeping things less "frothy" than Western markets (where most governments are running scared of the big global corps).
Outside of EVs and more broadly China rates near the bottom for market freedom
https://gfmag.com/data/economic-freedom-by-country/
If the broader market is rigged, investors don’t rush in for just one segment.
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I know little about stocks, but I've heard China doesn't allow shorting stocks and many other "advanced" stock products/instruments. You can buy, sell and trade stocks, and nothing else. They also audit to ensure stocks are not oversold/traded (e.g.: selling stock you don’t own in the hopes you’ll obtain some in time to fulfil an order).
Maybe that's why they behave differently?
You could say that about the Chinese stock market in general. Neither the SSE Composite nor the Hang Seng correlate all that well with Chinese GDP growth.
Chinese companies are optimized to grow and build stuff. US companies are optimized to deliver returns to shareholders.
Chinese stocks have historically done poorly due to poor governance and auditing failures.
Stock prices are forward looking.
You bought BYD after it had been hyped to the moon. Of course the price doesn’t move when it meets sales expectations.
Yeah, and if you have decent eyesight you can look forward even further to see the bubble popping.
Chinese stock market is very different than US. In US you have like 62% of Americans reporting owning stock (including via mutual funds/retirement accounts) and in China, it's single digits participation. And China's market is famously retail heavy one, there were some studies showing that Shanghai Stock Exchange retail trading is 80%+ of volume vs ~10% in the US.
There is less hype and they are also not affected as much as US if stock goes down or stays flat.
The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, and consumer investors feel it is more like gambling than investing. Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you just want to invest money, there is real estate or investing in a family member’s business. Pensions and other institutions in need of safe (in aggregate) investments won’t go near the SSE yet.
China is doing more things right but still has a long way to go on other things.
> The Shanghai stock exchange is still too heavy on insider trading, [...]
What does that mean?
Insider trading is good for the function of the market: it makes sure information is reflected in prices sooner, benefiting the general public.
> Like, you could wager some money on a mahjong game, or you could blindly pick a stock and hope you can get some money by riding in the wake of a connected insider trader.
If you are a clueless retail investor, buy a low cost index fund. Why would you be picking stocks?
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The Chinese economy isn't set up to endlessly create value for the capital-owning class, so you are never going to profit off of Chinese companies and stocks in the way we are used to in the west.
it make sense with geo politics, governments started slowly using same playbook, banning chinese cars anywere possible because of real risks of espionage etc.
[flagged]
Do you own stock in them?
it's the only thing you ever comment about.
Perhaps it’s Elon’s HN account!
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> Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Wrong orifice.
Purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth as well as the 1 million cars sold world wide, 165 successful Falcon 9 launches and 9 million Starlink subscriptions
SpaceX’s success have no bearing on Tesla. And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
You are right that SpaceX is a separate company.
> And Tesla’s sales for the year are down for the second year in a row. Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up.
If the market originally expected and priced in an even bigger decline, the stock would logically go up. Because of all the possible anticipations stock price movements are hard to understand, even in retrospect.
Tesla is more than one person. Plenty of incredibly talented people at Tesla that is not Elon.
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I think he's implying that SpaceX's success is evidence that Musk can possibly deliver on the robotaxis and Optimus forecasts, thus justifying TSLA's multiple. I for one am skeptical.
"Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up"
I think its because Elon would continue to be CEO of tesla , Elon is a brand at this point
its well known "brand", Yes there is a lot to hate but you cant ignore his huge follower
I mean Elon can come to Saudi and Saudi can invest in his company because they like him, that is just the way it works
> "Hardly a logical reason for the stock to go up"
Surely this can't be a serious nor a logical statement so I'll have to assume it's a joke or engagement bait. Here are 3 that I can think off the top of my head.
1. Robotaxi TAM: Tesla's already running unsupervised Robotaxis (no safety driver) in Austin tests as of late 2025, with plans to expand cities in 2026 — that's not vaporware, it's early scaling of high-margin autonomy.
2. Cross-country FSD milestone? Legit: A Tesla owner just nailed 10,000+ intervention-free miles on FSD v14.2 coast-to-coast in Dec 2025, including parking and Supercharging — verified via telemetry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnLswbNB0SU
3. Model Y #1 for 3rd year? Tesla proudly claimed it in their 2025 recap as of the latest DEC 2025 data.
Stock still up ~11-25% in 2025 despite EV headwinds and ending of EV credits because the market prices in future upside: autonomy software margins, energy storage boom, Optimus, and robotaxi fleets. That's logical valuation, not "no reason."
Dismissing all that while cherry picking doubts is at best nothing but drivel.
Nice. Now take the car sales out of the vacuum and let’s see how great sales look year over across the world. Now let’s factor in how Elon’s government ended subsidies for electric cars. Should I go on?
My guess is that Tesla is doing better because FSD has improved significantly over the past few months. Even with that, most of the recent increase has been them regaining the valuation they lost earlier this year.
Talking about FSD has increased, nothing more.
There is still the law suite about FSD and the old hardware.
There is still Elon the hitler Musk Oligarch who wielded a chainsaw.
There were plenty of FSD videos last year and the year before showing that FSD is working. The question is still, is it working good enough, and what will be the business of a robotaxi.
The Taxi market overall is not that big, competition is hard and the most critical thing is peak demand.
In parallel random people believe tesla will wipe out the whole taxi industry + private cars tomorrow. Ignoring competition and everything else.
Aaand as an edit: When it finally works, people will tell you "told you so look at it, FSD works" yeah really? Of course it works but it was promised from Musk that 2020 all these Teslas will drive autonomsly. Its 2026
The performance of V3 and V4 have improved significantly. I use them daily, more V3 than V4.
It's partially about fully automated cars, but that's barely started. IMO, it's more about them as ADAS now.
And it's not just about whether anyone else will catch up in terms of automation/ADAS, it's about whether anyone else will catch up in terms of manufacturing+automation/ADAS.
Edit- And yes, Elon acting like that doesn't help, but Tesla isn't Elon.
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Source?
My use of V3/V4 daily and other anecdotes.
https://nypost.com/2025/12/31/tech/tesla-owner-completes-fir...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1pmnilm/se...
> I bought BYD stock in 2025 before split in the hope that their market dominance will translate to great returns. The stock has pretty consistently traded down since then. Meanwhile Tesla stock soared purely on the air coming out of Elon’s mouth.
Interesting take there. Tesla Model Y is the #1 best-selling car globally in 2025 for the third year.
Meanwhile, your BYD is bleeding from real price wars and demand slumps. Tesla's valuation? Still baked in autonomy, energy, and AI upside not just car volume. Calling it "air" while hyping your own wishful dominance is nothing but peak projection.
Toyota RAV4 seems to be the best selling car globally in 2025, not model y. Overall tesla models looks dated, quality is not great, ongoing safety issue with underwhelming responses, competition on the ev segment is just better on many points now.
You cannot deny that Tesla has not been selling as well as other EV manufacturers. You also cannot deny that Tesla has took a heavy beating internationally.
Tesla valuation is not baked in anything, it's entirely hype about potential, and has absolutely nothing to do with automation, robotics, AI, energy. It is largely betting that Elon Musk will do well, not that Tesla will do well. It might as well just be called EM.
I can't tell if this is satire or serious.
You are clearly clueless about the current state of EVs. I'm willing to bet you haven't even driven or owned a Tesla or BYD. So you're uninformed at best.
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