WEEKLY ROUNDUP Here’s How to Pivot From EV Headwinds to Robotics TailwindsVIEW IN BROWSER Hello, Reader. “Beware the Ides of March” is a well-known warning from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar – in which a seer delivers the infamous warning to the Roman emperor before his assassination. It is often used to symbolize a day of doom or inevitable misfortune. I’m here to issue a similar warning: Beware the earnings of April. Especially those from Big Tech and the other hyperscalers. Tesla Corp. (TSLA) is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings for 2026 this Wednesday, April 22. The company beat earnings estimates in the last quarter, but its annual revenue fell for the first time. This quarter, Tesla is expected to post year-over-year earnings growth of around 40%. That might sound enticing, but I advise pumping the breaks. At the beginning of this month, Tesla saw its steepest drop of 2026 after reporting a 14% quarter-over-quarter decrease in global vehicle deliveries. Analysts were expecting 370,000 deliveries for the first quarter, but the company only delivered 358,023. We can see that Tesla is getting crushed around the world by Chinese competitors, like BYD Co. Ltd. (BYDDF), that produce more affordable electric vehicles. BYD is beating Tesla at its own game. Although it sold fewer EVs in the first quarter of 2026 than Tesla did, it sold around 2.25 million EVs in all of 2025 – beating Tesla by around 600,000 units. BYD is making more cars and more money – all while selling its vehicles for just over $10,000. That is one-third of what the cheapest Tesla costs. And Musk can’t depend on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots to save his company. Tesla has yet to find formal commitments from large companies wanting to purchase Optimus robots. The company failed to meet its stated goal of producing at least 5,000 Optimus robots in 2025 (but has nevertheless upped the ante to producing 1 million units by the end of 2026). I find this news unsurprising, as I have long had Tesla on my “Sell” list. In 2016, when the company unveiled its Model 3 to a flurry of pre-orders and excitement, I sold the EV-maker. Instead, I looked in a different direction and bought Teck Resources Ltd. (TECK), a Canadian mining company. Over the next 10 months, Tesla fell 9%, while Teck soared a whopping 745%. And now I’m making the same call again: Tesla does not belong in your portfolio. But this time, I’m not looking in the opposite direction. Instead, I’m looking at a direct competitor to Optimus. Specifically, I’ve identified a robotics company that uses AI software to control robots that are tailor-made for warehouses and distribution centers. This company’s robots are designed for specific tasks within the warehouse environment, emphasizing speed, accuracy, and efficiency in handling goods. These robots travel 5X faster than Optimus and can carry several hundred more pounds. So, while Tesla is lagging behind in building robots for the future, this company is already printing money with robots today. Its revenue has spiked 15-fold – from just $100 million in 2019 to over $1.5 billion today. And its backlog means there’s another $23 billion in future sales already baked in the cake. This company is up 27% in the last month, while Tesla is up only 7%. You can learn the name of this company – for free – right now. I’ve put all of this company’s information in my Sell This, Buy That presentation, which you can view here. Now, let’s take a look back at what we covered here at Smart Money in the past week, including several other warnings:
The driving forces that truly move stock prices. Allbirds Inc.’s (BIRD) trend-chasing shift. The question every investor gets wrong. Why Oracle Corp’s (ORCL) aggressive push into AI is risky. |
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