An Arcimoto “fun utility vehicle.”
Courtesy Arcimoto
Smaller electric-vehicle names are soaring again. Good luck trying to find a reason for the big moves.
Stock in commercial-EV maker Workhorse Group (ticker: WKHS), for starters, hit a new 52-week high, cracking $41 for the first time and almost hitting $42. Shares are up almost 15% in late Thursday trading.
Arcimoto (FUV) and Electrameccanica Vehicles (SOLO) make smaller EVs. That pair is up about 13% and 14%, respectively. Recent gains pushed Arcimoto’s market cap north of $1 billion.
Canoo (GOEV) is the fourth EV example. Its shares are up more than 12% Thursday.
There are some relatively new reasons for investors to be more bullish on most of these EV stocks. Canoo, for instance, has been linked to reports of a potential iCar from Apple (AAPL), though those reports are almost a month old.
Workhorse stock also jumped after President Joe Biden announced his intention to convert the government fleet of vehicles to all EVs. RBC analyst Joe Spak pointed out in a recent report that the federal government has more than 645,000 vehicles in its fleet. Still, that announcement came in January.
So did Arcimoto’s plan to buy another manufacturing facility in Oregon. The company is slated to close on the 185,000-square-foot facility in a few weeks. That deal was announced Jan. 6.
Electrameccanica news is harder to identify.
The moves could be aftershocks from the GameStop (GME) short-squeeze earthquake. All four stocks have high short interest—which is essentially the amount of stock borrowed and sold short compared with the amount of stock available for trading.
There is the Twitter effect to consider too. Tesla (TSLA) bull Ross Gerber tweeted out that he was invested in Arcimoto along with Tesla. Still, that tweet was Tuesday.
The rise is probably a combination of all the factors. And the stock price run didn’t start today. The four small-cap EV stocks are up about 28% on average over the past five trading days. The S&P 500 is up only about 2% over the same span. Year to date, the average gain in the small cap EV-four is more than 85%.
That’s another reason the stocks might be rising: FOMO, or fear of missing out. People are looking and seeing others make money in the names.
Whatever the reason, the gains demonstrate that investors, and traders, are still hungry to find the next big EV stock—and are hunting in the smaller end of the EV universe to find it.
Stock in Tesla, the EV giant, is down 0.9% Thursday, to $847 a share. The S&P 500 is up 0.9%.
Write to Al Root at [email protected]
