We recently published a list of 10 Stocks in Wall Street’s Watchlist. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) stands against other stocks in Wall Street’s watchlist.

Dan Niles, Niles Investment Management founder, in a latest program on CNBC reiterated his concerns about a slowdown in AI spending and said that major technology companies were already facing the impact of a downbeat trend in the industry before the tariff wars started:

“When the MAG 7 reported the December quarter or calendar Q4, six of the seven had their March revenue estimates already cut. So think about that for a second. But the thing is, when the Fed’s cutting like it was last year, nobody cares, right? If the stocks are going up, the charts look good. Why worry about fundamentals or valuations?,” Niles said. “Because the stocks are going higher. So looking forward, I expect all the estimates to come down yet again for the June quarter. When these companies report the March quarter, they were already having troubles when they reported the December quarter before all this tariff stuff kicked in.”

Niles said that companies were buying more ahead of the China tariffs because they expected that duties were coming from the US.

“You can just see that from the China export data already, where for China as a whole, in the month of March, exports were up 12.4%. People were expecting 4.6%. So that’s a massive beat there. And so you can already tell demand’s being pulled forward. So my thought was there was a payback period coming anyway.”

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For this article, we picked 10 stocks Wall Street analysts have been talking about lately. With each stock, we have mentioned its hedge fund sentiment. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 99

Steve Quirk, Robinhood chief brokerage officer, recently talked about the latest retail trade data released by his platform for February. Asked about the retail investors’ interest in Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) despite the latest declines, Quirk said:

“You know, there’s a lot of people that have strong beliefs in Tesla, and that’s it. And you know, they are looking at this as an opportune time to add to portfolios. And you know, they’re a lot like portfolio managers. These, these, they’re quite savvy, our customers. They’re, they rotate out of names where they see nice appreciation, and they rotate into ones where they think there’s an opportunity.”

Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:

“The largest relative detractors in the quarter were Tesla, Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) (not owned), Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Broadcom (not owned). We’ve spoken at length about our rationale for not owning Tesla. The stock enjoyed a 54% return during the quarter, with effectively all of the share price performance strength coming in the post-election period, as the market expressed a positive view on Elon Musk’s prominent role in the incoming Trump administration and its potential implications for Tesla. While we agree this development should be a net positive for Tesla and recognize the company’s interesting future prospects for autonomous driving and humanoid robots, its current valuation demands that shareholders pay primarily for potential innovations that have yet to materialize, with uncertain risks and timelines, presenting a different type of risk profile than we are comfortable with. Today, Tesla is an automobile manufacturer limited to the higher-income segment and is increasingly challenged to sell vehicles when interest rates are not zero. As such, we continue to question the company’s long-term growth profile, its ability to scale a large robotaxi service (which seems to be the source of euphoria in Tesla shares), and its corporate governance.”

Overall, TSLA ranks 6th on our list of stocks in Wall Street’s watchlist. While we acknowledge the potential of TSLA, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than TSLA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.