Tesla Earnings Calls 2019-2021

Event / format: Tesla’s twelve quarterly earnings calls across 2019-2021 (2019 Q1-Q4, 2020 Q1-Q4, 2021 Q1-Q4), reported from April 2019 through January 2022. This is the scale-and-profitability era. It opens in the lean, capital-starved early-2019 quarters Musk himself called a “Spartan diet”. From there it runs through the Model 3/Model Y ramp, the opening of Giga Shanghai, and the COVID-19 shutdown with the bet to keep expanding through it. Then comes a stretch of sustained GAAP profit, S&P 500 inclusion, and the public FSD beta rollout. The closing Q4 2021 call delivers the pivot: he names the Optimus humanoid robot the most important product Tesla has in development. Each call is a multi-speaker investor event — an IR host (Martin Viecha) opens, Elon Musk (CEO) gives opening remarks and answers, CFOs (Zachary Kirkhorn) and other executives hand off, and sell-side analysts ask the questions. Q3 2021 is the one exception: Musk didn’t take part, the call was run by the CFO and executives, so it yields no block quote here and sits only as era context.
Era arc: if 2016-2018 was the era when the durable mental models got stress-tested live under the Model 3 “production hell,” 2019-2021 is the era when they settle into a confident, repeated doctrine while the company’s self-definition keeps widening. The signature thread is still the autonomy timeline, restated almost every quarter at peak confidence and plainly recurring without ever resolving. It runs “home to office… by the end of the year” (Q1 2020), then “drive itself… this year” (Q4 2020). By Q4 2021 it hardens into “my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year” and “I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year”. Beside it the prototypes-are-easy / production-is-hard maxim hardens into a near-verbatim refrain across 2020-2021 (“prototypes are trivial… production is hard”; “the thing that’s remarkable is that Tesla didn’t go bankrupt in reaching volume production”). The mission gets re-derived from impact tests (the terawatt-hour bar, “1% of the global fleet per year”) and then widens, with Tesla recast as “as much an AI robotics company” (Q1 2021) and the Optimus pivot arriving in Q4 2021. Threaded through it all is a stretch of unusually candid self-revelation: the 50th-percentile theory of his own predictions, “punctuality is not my strong suit,” the Buffett manic-depressive-markets borrowing. What’s worth reading here is the motion and the recurrence in those threads across the era’s dated points — the eleven calls Musk spoke on, since he sat out Q3 2021.
Trust tier: verified. Each call has a full stockanalysis.com transcript. Some quarters carry explicit Elon Musk -- CEO, Tesla speaker labels (Q3 2020 and Q4 2021 in the Q&A, for instance). Others, including the 2019 calls and Q2 2021, run the opening remarks and answers as continuous prose with no inline turn labels: the host’s intro begins “…Elon has some opening remarks. Elon?”, Musk’s monologue then runs as paragraphs, and executive hand-offs like “Drew’s going to talk a bit more about the 4680 production” are clearly marked. On the label-light calls he is attributed by unmistakable first-person tells, characteristic phrasing, and opener/Q&A-answer position; the CFO and engineering hand-offs (cell and battery deep-dives, the financial summaries) read as plainly distinct and aren’t quoted. Only Musk’s words are block-quoted, never a CFO or executive turn and never an analyst question. Q3 2021 has no Musk, so it has no quote.
Quotes: from the stockanalysis.com transcripts, each linked to its own quarter’s call. Where a quote runs across a paragraph break in the transcript, the join is marked with an ellipsis (…).

Summary

These calls track Tesla crossing from a lean, doubted, cash-strapped company to a steadily profitable one in the S&P 500, running at global scale. Most of each call is financials, guidance, ramp detail, and factory progress in China, Berlin, and Texas, all kept in prose or left out. What’s worth keeping is how his durable beliefs recur and shift as the pressure moves from survival to scale, quarter-dated point by point. Musk spoke on eleven of the twelve calls; he sat out Q3 2021.

The spine of the era is the autonomy timeline, the most-restated and most-falsifiable thread in these calls. He opens 2019 with the conceptual groundwork: the three-levels framing of what “feature complete” means, and the conviction that flipping a car from not-robotaxi to robotaxi “will probably be the biggest step change increase in asset value in history” (Q3 2019). Across 2020-2021 the prediction comes back almost every quarter at full confidence. It runs “home to your office… by the end of the year” (Q1 2020), then “the [car] will drive itself with the liability in excess of humans this year” (Q4 2020), then “I am highly confident that we will get this done” (Q1 2021). Q4 2021 pushes hardest of all: “my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year”, and “I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked”. The reasoning sharpens as the date keeps moving. Self-driving becomes “a pretty significant Part of artificial intelligence, specifically real world artificial intelligence” (Q1 2021), and “being safer than a human is a low standard, not a high standard” (Q4 2021). The payoff is cast in civilizational terms: “one of the most valuable things that is ever done in the history of civilization” (Q2 2021).

The second thread is the production-is-hard maxim, hardening into a near-verbatim refrain. The S-curve model of ramps recurs (“manufacturing follows the S-curve,” Q3 2020), and the prototypes-versus-production line gets stated again and again: “Prototypes are easy. Scaling production is very hard” (Q4 2020), “Prototypes are trivial. They’re child’s play” (Q1 2021), “I’m fond of saying that prototypes are easy and production is hard” (Q2 2021). Each time he wraps it in the same reframe of what Tesla actually pulled off, which is survival, not the product: “the thing that’s remarkable is that Tesla didn’t go bankrupt in reaching volume production.” The factory is the moat (“the long term sustainable advantage of Tesla… will be manufacturing,” Q2 2020). In Q3 2020 he even points back to that very claim, “A comment I made in the past… I am quite confident this will be what happens”, one of the rare times he cites his own prior-quarter belief. He models the factory as a living thing: “a factory is like a giant cybernetic collective”, “a whole chain of startups”.

The third thread is the mission, restated as identity and re-derived from impact rather than revenue. Success isn’t defined by revenue, it’s scale of effect: “If you’re not in the terawatt hour range, it’s a nice news story, but it’s not fundamentally changing the energy equation” (Q2 2019), “unless we change at least 1% of the vehicles per year” (Q3 2020). Affordability is a moral constraint, not a pricing call: “We will not succeed in our mission if we do not make cars affordable” (Q2 2020). Then the mission widens. Tesla becomes “as much an AI robotics company as we are a car company” (Q1 2021), and Q4 2021 is the era’s clearest turn in his thinking. He names the Optimus humanoid robot “the most important product development we’re doing this year… more significant than the vehicle business over time,” and grounds it in a first-principles economic argument: “Capital equipment is distilled labor”.

The era is also unusually candid about himself. The keystone is his model of his own forecasting: “I give you the 50th percentile, not the three sigma… at least half my predictions will be wrong” (Q1 2020). That is also his explanation for why the autonomy dates keep slipping, paired with “punctuality is not my strong suit, but I always come through in the end.” He explains his attitude to public markets through a borrowed Buffett analogy, the “manic depressive” neighbor yelling prices at your house. He states his counter-cyclical risk posture mid-pandemic (“continue to expand rapidly… even though it is risky”). His AI-risk worldview surfaces again (“the [people] most [bullish] about AI are the ones who are very smart because they can’t imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them”). And a warning about complacency closes 2021: “the seeds of defeat are sown on the day of victory”.

Several of these are dated, falsifiable predictions: the end-of-year FSD timelines repeated almost every quarter, the “safer than a human this year” claims, the “biggest increase in asset value… in history” framing. The autonomy timelines did not hold. All financial figures, the S&P-500-inclusion and capital-raise mechanics, the China, Berlin and Texas factory and battery-cell engineering, and product spec stay in prose, never block-quoted as fact.

Key quotes

The autonomy timeline — restated at peak confidence, year after year (2019-2021)

The spine of the era, and its most falsifiable thread. It opens in 2019 with the conceptual groundwork: his three-levels account of what autonomy actually requires, and a grandiose claim about what it would be worth.

“we think the car is safe enough to be driven without supervision. Then the 3rd level would be that regulators are also convinced that the car can be driven autonomously without supervision. Those are 3 different levels.” ↗

“That transition, that sort of flipping of the switch from a car that is from not robotaxi to robotaxi I think will probably be the biggest step change increase in asset value in history by far.” ↗

“the real mind blowing situation is high volume, high margin because of autonomy.” ↗

Then the prediction itself starts coming back nearly every quarter, always at full confidence. Here is the earliest 2020 form and its 2021 echo, each a dated point on the same recurring, slipping timeline.

“We really feel we’re extremely confident that it will be possible to do a drive from your home to your office most of the time with no interventions by the end of the year.” ↗

“And this is basically, I’m highly confident the call will drive itself with the liability in excess of humans this year.” ↗

By 2021 the reasoning sharpens. Self-driving becomes a fundamental AI problem, and the confidence never dims.

“And really in order to solve it, we basically need to solve a pretty significant Part of artificial intelligence, specifically real world artificial intelligence.” ↗

“So It’s really quite tricky, but I am highly confident that we will get this done.” ↗

“I’m highly confident that the cars will be capable of Full Self-Driving. If they have a Full Self-Driving computer and the cameras, I’m confident that they will be able to drive themselves with a safety level substantially greater than that of the average person.” ↗

The Q4 2021 call pushes the timeline hardest of all: the bare one-year prediction, then the emphatic “I would be shocked”.

“You know, my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year.” ↗

“I would be shocked if we do not achieve Full Self-Driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked.” ↗

Underneath sits the argument that frames the difficulty: humans are a low bar, “lossy” and distracted. He pairs it with the asset-value and cost-of-transport reframes that make autonomy the central lever of the company’s value.

“Frankly, being safer than a human is a low standard, not a high standard. People are very, very lossy, often distracted, tired, you know, texting.” ↗

“Really the thing that overwhelmingly matters is when is the car autonomous? At the point at which it’s autonomous, the cost of transport drops by, I don’t know, a factor of four or five.” ↗

“the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history.” ↗

And the long view: autonomy is inevitable for all transport, with the safety argument flipped on its head, the way it once became unsafe to run an elevator by hand.

“I mean, really long-term, all transport will go autonomous. Yeah. Horses are already autonomous. All transport will go autonomous.” ↗

“Autonomy will become so safe that it will be unsafe to manually operate the car, relatively speaking.” ↗

“Prototypes are easy, production is hard” — the maxim hardens into a refrain (2019-2021)

The second spine of the era. The S-curve model of production ramps carries over from the prior era, now stated as settled doctrine.

“A production pretty much always follows S curve or it’s kind of like a hokey jerky S curve. And it’s easy to predict what it’s going to be like in the beginning because it’s slow and it’s easy to predict what it’s going to be like at the end, but that intermediate portion of the S curve is very difficult to predict.” ↗

“Just in general, manufacturing follows the S-curve. You know, I think sometimes people that haven’t spent a lot of time in manufacturing kind of think that once you have a factory, you can just sort of turn it on and it’s at capacity.” ↗

Then comes the “prototypes are easy, production is hard” belief, stated almost word for word across three quarters running. Each time he ties it to the same reframe of Tesla’s real achievement, which is survival rather than the product.

“So things to bear in mind is If one is not involved in manufacturing, it’s really hard to appreciate just how hard it is to scale production. It’s the hardest thing in the world. Prototypes are easy. Scaling production is very hard.” ↗

“the thing to bear in mind With production is for those who have never done production, they just don’t understand how insanely hard production is. I want to repeat very, very emphatic here. Prototypes are trivial. They’re child’s play. … Production is hard, is very hard.” ↗

“What Tesla achieved on the automotive side was not to create an electric car. The truly profound thing On the car side is that Tesla was the 1st American car company to achieve volume production of a car in 100 years and not go bankrupt.” ↗

“I’m fond of saying that prototypes are easy and production is hard. Arguably, the really remarkable thing that Tesla’s done is not to make an electric car or to be a car startup, because there have been hundreds of car startups in the United States and outside the United States. The thing that’s remarkable is that Tesla didn’t go bankrupt in reaching volume production.” ↗

His weakest-link model of production rate, where the whole thing moves only as fast as its least lucky part, and his conviction that the factory is the durable edge. The Q3 2020 line is rare in that he openly cites a belief he stated the quarter before.

“the rate of growth of production goes as fast as the least lucky and dumbest of those 10,000 things. A bunch of them are not even in our control. It’s insanely difficult.” ↗

“So the long term sustainable advantage of Tesla, I think, will be manufacturing.” ↗

“A comment I made in the past is that I think Tesla’s long-term competitive strength will be primarily manufacturing. This is counterintuitive, but I am quite confident this will be what happens.” ↗

The “machine that makes the machine” mantra, the factory as a living system, and a vivid statement of the culture he wants on the line, where the people who build the thing get to redesign it.

“You know, we made the machine that made the machine that made the machine.” ↗

“There’s probably 1,000%, maybe 10000% more engineering required for the factory than for the product itself.” ↗

“A factory is like a giant cybernetic collective, you can’t just hire 10,000 people and have it working smoothly. It’s just not possible.” ↗

“It’s not like you just get to touch the product and say, hey, make this product and it’s kind of a lousy design. You’d get if you’re a manufacturer, you get to change the product design and say, hey, this product you’re asking me to manufacture is dumb. We’re like, great, let’s fix it. So at Tesla, if you work on manufacturing and engineering, you don’t just get force fed a toad sandwich, you get to change the product design.” ↗

First-principles reasoning and the texture of his cognition (2019-2021)

The era is thick with his signature reasoning moves. First, why people misjudge Tesla: we can’t feel an exponential. Then the textbook Battery-Day move of deriving the cell from physics limits rather than benchmarking competitors.

“We didn’t evolve to feel an exponential. We can feel a linear, but we could only understand an exponential at a cognitive level. But Tesla is expanding at an exponential rate.” ↗

“What’s the Platonic ideal of a perfect cell, and how close can we get there?” ↗

The line between cutting cost and cutting corners (any fool can make a car worse), the vision-only case against LiDAR boiled down to one first-principles argument, and the belief that renewable energy is an engineering job, not a science one.

“It’s any fool can take cost out of a car and make it worse. We wanna take cost out of the car, figure out how to make it lighter, and simpler.” ↗

“Once you solve passive optical, you’ve solved Self-Driving, so why bother with anything else?” ↗

“I want to be clear, no new physics is necessary, no new materials necessary. We just need to scale this thing up. The technology exists today to solve renewable energy.” ↗

His model of how to grind through hard software problems, and, closing out 2021, the ideas-versus-execution belief he has repeated across his whole career, with the first-principles economic argument that underwrites Optimus.

“Over time, if you do two steps forward and one step back and keep going, you do move forward.” ↗

“Just in general, societally, there’s way too much value placed on the idea. It’s like, you know, like, you can have the idea of going to the moon. That’s not the hard part. Okay? Going to the moon is the hard part by far.” ↗

“If you think about the economy, it is the foundation of the economy is labor. Capital equipment is distilled labor. What happens if you don’t actually have a labor shortage? I’m not sure what an economy even means at that point.” ↗

The mission — re-derived from impact, then widened to AI and robotics (2019-2021)

The mission gets restated as identity and re-derived from impact rather than revenue. Here are the canonical statement, the three-pillar framing, and the belief that affordability is a moral constraint.

“And Tesla’s mission from the beginning has been to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, that means sustainable energy generation and sustainable energy consumption in the form of electric vehicles.” ↗

“Vehicle sometimes just have these sort of pretty absurd notions like if demand is high, can’t you just charge any price? Like no, you cannot charge any price. I think making our cars more affordable is also fundamentally part of the Tesla mission.” ↗

“We will not succeed in our mission if we do not make cars affordable.” ↗

Success is measured by scale of impact, not revenue: the terawatt-hour bar and the “1% of the global fleet per year” test, an order-of-magnitude framing he keeps returning to.

“In order to really make a fundamental shift in the world’s energy usage and really transform things to a sustainable energy future, If you’re not in the terawatt hour range, it’s a nice news story, but it’s not fundamentally changing the energy equation.” ↗

“It’s difficult to say that, you know, are we really changing the world if we’re not switching out 1% of the global fossil fuel vehicles? I mean, it’s, I’m not sure that we can make that argument unless we change at least 1% of the vehicles per year.” ↗

Then the mission widens. Tesla is re-identified as an AI and robotics company, the autonomous fleet is framed in civilizational terms, and Q4 2021 brings the Optimus pivot, the era’s clearest turn in his thinking. Even as the priority shifts, he restates the founding mission.

“So, yes, just basically saying that the although like right now people think of Tesla is a car company or perhaps an energy company. I think long term people will think of Tesla As much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company.” ↗

“Really, the value of a fully electric autonomous fleet is insanely gigantic. Boggles the mind, really. That will be one of the most valuable things that is ever done in the history of civilization.” ↗

“In terms of priority of products, I think the most important product development we’re doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot. This I think has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.” ↗

“You know, our primary mission is to accelerate sustainable energy. That’s always been our primary mission, and we’re trying to stay true to that.” ↗

Self-revelation — how he predicts, how he sees markets, how he takes risk (2019-2021)

The most candid stretch of the era. The keystone is his model of his own forecasting, which doubles as his explanation for why his timelines miss, paired with how he frames his own track record.

“I give the guess that I think is the likely midpoint, not the point with lots of margin. If this is normal distribution, I give you the 50th percentile, not the three sigma, you know, optimistic or pessimistic. That naturally means at least half my predictions will be wrong and half will be right.” ↗

“I believe as everything I’ve ever said would come true, did come true. It may have come true late, but it did come true. You know, punctuality is not my strong suit, but I always come through in the end.” ↗

His attitude to public markets, borrowed from Buffett, and his conviction that scarcity is a “forcing function” for discipline, both stated in the lean early-2019 quarter.

“Well, it being public does feel like the sort of price of the stock is being set in kind of a manic depressive way. And Warren Buffett’s analogy is just like being a publicly traded company is like having someone stand at the edge of your home and just randomly yell different prices for your house every day. Still the same house. So it’s a bit of a distraction at times, but I’m not sure what to do about it.” ↗

“I don’t think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company operate more effectively. So in that sense, I think it’s important to have strong financial discipline at the company and just to make sure we don’t have extraneous expenses and that we’re just being frugal with capital, if we just keep raising capital every time, then it just takes we don’t have the forcing function for improving the fundamental operation of the business. So I think it is healthy to be on a Spartan diet for a while.” ↗

His habit of stating corporate purpose as a quantity to maximize, the counter-cyclical risk posture he took mid-pandemic, and the slim-profit-for-maximum-growth strategy he keeps subordinate to the mission.

“I should mention, like, at a high level, our overall goal is to maximize the area under the curve of customer happiness. That is our goal.” ↗

“We, you know, came to the conclusion that the right move is actually to continue to expand rapidly, continue to invest in the future in new technologies, even though it is risky.” ↗

“But we’re not trying to be super profitable either.” ↗

“You actually have to reach scale production, and have cash in exceeds cash out. That’s the super hard part.” ↗

His recurring AI-risk worldview and the blind spot he sees in smart skeptics, his picture of Tesla as a portfolio of internal startups, and the warning about complacency that closes the era.

“The people I see being the most strong about AI are the ones who are very smart because they can’t imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them.” ↗

“The thing I think that people just don’t really understand about Tesla is that it is a whole chain of startups.” ↗

“I think the U.S. has an overallocation of talent in finance and law. It’s both a criticism and a compliment. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people in finance and law. I’m just saying maybe we have too many smart people in those arenas.” ↗

“The seeds of defeat are sown on the day of victory, and we must be careful that we do not do that. If you look at history, so often the seeds of defeat are sown on the day of victory. We will endeavor not to make that the case at Tesla.” ↗

What is deliberately NOT quoted

All financial numbers and quantified guidance: revenue, gross margin, deliveries, the Model 3/Y ramp-rate figures, the S&P-500-inclusion and capital-raise mechanics, kept in prose or left out as business spec. What is quoted under self-revelation is the reasoning and the belief, the Spartan-diet forcing-function or the not-super-profitable strategy, never a transaction figure.
All product and engineering detail: the 4680 cell and structural-pack engineering, the Giga Shanghai/Berlin/Texas line mechanics, the Autopilot and FSD-beta sensor and compute spec, the chip-shortage logistics. That is engineering, not mind. The “Platonic ideal of a perfect cell” and “passive optical” lines are kept only for their first-principles framing.
Every other speaker. The IR host (Martin Viecha), the CFO (Zachary Kirkhorn), the engineering executives handing off the 4680 cell, and all analyst questions are left out; only Elon Musk is quoted. On the label-light calls the executive hand-offs and financial summaries are explicitly excluded.

Connections (pages touched)

Autonomous driving — extended with the era’s near-quarterly restatement of the FSD timeline at peak confidence: the three-levels framing and the robotaxi “biggest step change… in asset value” (2019) → “home to your office… by the end of the year” (Q1 2020) → “drive itself… in excess of humans this year” (Q4 2020) → “real world artificial intelligence” and “highly confident” (Q1 2021) → “safety level substantially greater than… the average person” and “unsafe to manually operate” (Q2 2021) → “my personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year” and “I would be shocked… safer than a human this year”, plus “being safer than a human is a low standard” and the asset-value and cost-of-transport reframes (Q4 2021); and the “all transport will go autonomous” inevitability.
The engineering algorithm — extended with the prototypes-are-easy / production-is-hard maxim hardening into a near-verbatim refrain across 2020-2021 (“Prototypes are easy. Scaling production is very hard” → “Prototypes are trivial. They’re child’s play” → “I’m fond of saying that prototypes are easy and production is hard”), each one bound to “Tesla didn’t go bankrupt in reaching volume production”; the S-curve ramp model restated; the factory as the moat, with the explicit self-reference “A comment I made in the past… I am quite confident this will be what happens” (Q3 2020); “we made the machine that made the machine that made the machine”; the factory as “a giant cybernetic collective”; and the “toad sandwich” belief about empowering the people on the line.
First principles — extended with the can’t-feel-an-exponential observation (“We didn’t evolve to feel an exponential”), the Battery-Day physics-limit derivation (“the Platonic ideal of a perfect cell”), the line between cutting cost and cutting corners (“any fool can take cost out of a car and make it worse”), the vision-only “passive optical” argument, the renewable-energy-is-engineering-not-science belief (“no new physics is necessary”), the perseverance model (“two steps forward and one step back”), and the ideas-versus-execution belief (“going to the moon is the hard part”) with its “capital equipment is distilled labor” economic corollary.
Sustainable-energy mission — extended with the mission re-derived from impact (the terawatt-hour bar, “1% of the vehicles per year”), affordability as a moral constraint (“We will not succeed in our mission if we do not make cars affordable”; “can’t… just charge any price”), the canonical statement and three-pillar framing, and the mission widening into AI and robotics (“as much an AI robotics company”) through the Optimus pivot (Q4 2021), with the founding mission restated.
Humanoid robots — extended with the earliest earnings-call statement of the Optimus thesis (Q4 2021): “the most important product development we’re doing this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot… more significant than the vehicle business over time,” justified by “Capital equipment is distilled labor”. It puts the robotics priority on the record as far back as January 2022.
AI existential risk — extended with the recurring belief that smart people underrate AI risk because “they can’t imagine that a computer could be way smarter than them” (Q2 2020).
Talent misallocation — extended with the verbatim earnings-call statement of the belief, “the U.S. has an overallocation of talent in finance and law… too many smart people in those arenas” (Q2 2021), the first directly citable original for this concept.
Tesla — extended with an “Earnings calls 2019-2021 — scale, profitability, and the Optimus pivot” note threading the scale-and-profitability era: the Spartan-diet start, the Model 3/Y ramp and Giga Shanghai, the counter-cyclical expansion through the pandemic, S&P-500 inclusion, the FSD-beta timeline restated at peak confidence, the production-is-hard refrain, and the Optimus pivot to close.
Elon Musk — extended with a “Tesla earnings calls (2019–2021): the models stabilize, the self-definition widens” section threading the recurring-then-slipping autonomy timeline, the production-is-hard maxim as refrain, the mission re-derived from impact and widened to robotics, and the candid self-revelations (the 50th-percentile forecasting model, “punctuality is not my strong suit,” the Buffett manic-depressive-markets borrowing, the counter-cyclical risk posture).