Tesla shares surpassed $300 for the first time ever in Tuesday trading, touching a new all-time high of $304. And according to one technical analyst, the short-term and long-term charts on Tesla continue to look downright electric.
"Regardless what you think about the valuation, this stock is not going to get beat by a spreadsheet. This is a great technical setup, and it's only gotten better here," Rich Ross, head of technical analysis for Evercore ISI, said Monday on CNBC's "Power Lunch."
Tesla shares gained over 7 percent on Monday, hitting an all-time high a day after the electric car maker reported its largest-ever quarterly total for vehicle deliveries. The company's market capitalization recently surpassed that of Ford, and is closing in on that of General Motors.
On a chart of the stock dating to September, Ross noted that shares have soared 20 percent from its level of "retracement" around $242, when the stock fell to its 50-day moving average earlier this year. A retracement is a temporary technical reversal in a security's price that runs against the longer-term trend. In other words, those earlier dips were nothing more than a temporary pullback, according to Ross.
Since February and early March, Ross said, "We now have a very decisive breakout of that trading range; that gets us to $320 in the short term."
But the "real magic" of the stock's technical setup, and the reason Ross sees even more upside ahead, can be found in a weekly chart going back to 2013. He pointed specifically to a "very bullish decisive breakout" from a multiyear trading range.
"Let's call it $280 on the high end, $180 on the low end, you tack $100 on top … that gets you to $380 over time. So, [for] Tesla, there's still food on the table here. I still like this stock. In fact, I like it even more on the breakout," Ross said, referring to the range that appears to form around the trading range that began forming in mid-2014.
Ross is no fair-weather fan; in February he told CNBC that Tesla would see substantial upside.
Taking the fundamental elements into account, Tesla appears to defy any "conventional metric," according to Eddy Elfenbein of the Crossing Wall Street blog.
"This is where the future is going. All these metrics don't work. All these metrics would have been true a year or two ago, but Tesla has fought the shorts every way," Elfenbein said, alluding to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk earlier on Monday in which he appeared to taunt those who have shorted the stock.
Elfenbein pointed to Chinese tech giant Tencent's recent acquisition of a 5 percent stake in Tesla as potentially beneficial for Tesla. Tencent, which operates social networking and online payment platforms in Asia as one of the largest tech companies there, spent $1.8 billion scooping up 8.2 million Tesla shares in early March.
"Tesla was burning through tremendous amounts of cash; now they have one of the largest companies in the world, the most valuable company in China backstopping them and giving them a foothold into the Chinese market. Tesla's an excellent buy right now," Elfenbein said.
Analysts currently give Tesla an average hold rating, according to FactSet data, with a bearish median target price of $248.26. Tesla closed Monday trading at $298.52 per share.
