Tesla's roller-coaster ride showed no sign of slowing Monday as the stock kicked off the week on a low note. And according to Piper Jaffray's top technical analyst, there's more pain ahead.
"Key support is at $285 and failure to hold this level leaves the shares back in the 2013-2016 consolidation range of $183-$285," Craig Johnson, senior technical market analyst at Piper Jaffray, told CNBC in an email on Monday.
The next two support levels Johnson and his team are eyeing are $285 per share and $243 per share, representing 5 percent and 20 percent of downside from current levels, respectively. Tesla, trading at about $298 per share on Monday after opening just above $291, fell as low as $244.59 in April before rebounding.
A note from J.P. Morgan analysts spurred the latest decline, as the firm reasserted its view that the stock is set to sink. Shares of the electric car maker have fallen 21 percent since Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, tweeted that he intended to take the company private. Weighing on the shares also was a report Monday that Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, which Musk said was ready to help fund a buyout, was actually looking at a rival electric auto maker, Lucid Motors.
The stock saw a brutal sell-off last Friday after Musk gave an emotional interview with The New York Times. Some market strategists are unsure Tesla could thrive without Musk at the helm.
"I think that Tesla's board needs to find a COO. Just because someone is a visionary does not make them a good operator," Gina Sanchez, CEO of Chantico Global, said Monday in an email to CNBC.
"Visionaries" are optimistic by nature, Sanchez said, and tend to "over-promise and under-deliver." While vehicle shipments have had issues arriving on time, Musk has accomplished a great deal during his tenure, and "it would hurt Tesla in the long run to lose Musk," Sanchez added.
