Tesla Bull Graham Tanaka Puts His Portfolio Investing Analysis on Display

July 15, 2019

Graham Tanaka, CFA, is President of Tanaka Capital Management. He has over 45 years of experience as an analyst and portfolio manager and over 30 years’ experience managing mutual funds.

He is an engineering graduate of Brown University and received an MBA from Stanford University. He was a metals and mining, farm machinery, conglomerate, housing, building materials and real estate analyst at Morgan Guaranty — J.P. Morgan — and a technology and special situations analyst at Fiduciary Trust International.

He has made numerous appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg Television, Reuters Television and Yahoo Finance Live and has been quoted in The Wall Street JournalInvestor’s Business DailyBusinessweekFortuneForbes and Moneymagazine. He is a member of the Electronics Analyst Group, a director of the Council for Economic Education and is the author of Digital Deflation — McGraw-Hill 2004.

In this 5,951 word interview, exclusively for the Wall Street Transcript, Mr. Tanaka details his analysis for many of his top portfolio holdings, including Tesla:

“In 2020, Tesla is going to come out with a compact version of their SUV. The current Model X is a large SUV; it’s a high-premium-value car with a high price at $90,000 and up.

The Model Y, which will be ramping next year, is going to become their midsize SUV, which today is the largest and fast-growing auto market segment in the world. That’s going to add a lot of demand for units.

And then, they’re going to come out with a pickup truck. We believe the Tesla pickup is going to be a premium-value, premium-price pickup that will have more features and functions that’ll blow away current pickup owners.

For electric vehicles, one of its biggest attributes is high torque. You can have instant acceleration. You don’t have to go through shifting gears at all. Just hit the accelerator, it takes off.

That is what pickup drivers want. They want high torque. They want to be able to pull a stump out of the ground.

They want to be able to haul a bunch of heavy stuff to the dump or pick up heavy items.

We believe that the demand for the pickup is going to be very high. And again, it’s already a high-margin product in the industry. Most of the profit pool for Detroit is SUVs and pickups.”

Read the complete 5,951 word interview for detailed explanations for this investment and more of Mr. Tanaka’s top picks, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.