Method
Every story here is built the same way: from the parts of a business up to a single, dated number — and it shows its work. Two lenses run in parallel. The Story asks what the business is worth. The Tape asks what the price is doing.
The story, in seven steps
-
1
Parts.
Break the company into the handful of businesses that actually drive its value — for Tesla: cars, software, energy, robotaxi, and Optimus — and value each on its own terms.
-
2
Levels.
Give every part three honest settings — bear, base, bull — anchored to what a reasonable person could believe. Five parts at three levels is 243 combinations; each one is priced in advance.
-
3
Evidence, dated.
Every input carries a source and an as-of date. A number without a date is not evidence — and nothing on the page is left undated.
-
4
Fences.
Each assumption is held inside a defensible band — its fence — drawn from the record, not from optimism. You cannot push a part past what the evidence supports.
-
5
The starting point.
One neutral, calibrated reading of the whole company — where the weight of the evidence sits today — becomes the anchor every story is measured against.
-
6
Dreams, labelled.
Claims that live beyond the fence — a robotaxi fleet, Optimus at scale — are never mixed into the calibrated numbers. They are fenced off and marked a claim, not analysis.
-
7
Re-stamps.
When the evidence moves, the whole model is regenerated at once and re-dated. Numbers never drift out of sync; if a figure cannot be trusted, the page refuses to render it.
The honesty grammar
A handful of marks do the honest work. Here is each one, live.
The vintage stamp. Every figure is dated; one stamp governs a cluster of numbers from the same reading.
A share worth $53.41 to the story you picked.
The two-voice rule. The prose is a serif; every number switches to a tabular sans. The sentence changes voice at the number.
This is what the story you picked is worth, not a price target.
The epistemic line code. A solid rule marks an observed number, a dashed rule a calibrated one, a dotted rule with an amber tick the part of the price no calibrated belief explains.
The dream fence. Figures beyond the evidence are fenced, never underlined, and always named to the person making the claim.
The flag. It marks where a story leans on something fragile.
The Tape, and how it is built
The Tape is the second lens: it describes what the price is doing, so a business that looks overvalued is never mistaken for a price that is falling. It is descriptive, never prescriptive — no buy or sell, no score, no prediction, no alerts — and it is re-stamped on an editorial cadence, never in real time.
From three years of daily prices, adjusted for splits and dividends, it computes weekly high-low-close bars; the 50- and 200-day averages, measured in trading days; five-bar fractal pivots that label each swing a higher high, lower high, higher low, or lower low; and, from those, the regime — an uptrend requires higher highs and higher lows. Supply and demand zones anchor on a pivot only when price rejected it by at least 8% within eight weeks, and each carries its formation date. Every run on the same data is byte-identical.
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Moving averages | 50 / 200 trading days |
| Fractal pivot | 5-bar, 2-week confirmation |
| Zone rejection window | 8 weekly bars |
| Zone rejection threshold | ≥ 8% move away |
| Zones emitted | up to 4 |
| Insufficient history | under 200 daily or 30 weekly bars |
Market structure described, not predicted. Educational, not investment advice.