evilgenius wrote:As I've stated, I am all about investing for the electric car and artificial intelligence future. Along those lines, Quantumscape, the solid state lithium battery company, took a huge crapper on the exchange the other day. Nobody could produce a reason.
Over the weekend previous, I had been searching for new investments. A site that I go to for tech information, the register, had an article about the future of batteries. They said that solid state was a pipe dream. They expected a future of incremental improvement in something more like what we are doing now. I think their article is what shat in the stew.
Anyway, although I place a great deal of trust in the register, I wasn't going to let a deal like Quantumscape at $50 get past me. The next day, it went up enough to pad me some. The padding still isn't too thick, but it looks good from a distance.
If solid state eventually works, this company could be one of those stocks where a person doesn't actually need to own that much of it to begin with. They just have to have some stake because as it rolls out there will be so many stock splits, and the share value itself will rise so much, that a small original stake will become something quite large. Either that, or it is a pipe dream. Diversification demands not putting too much into potential pipe dreams.
About a week before I bought QS, I bought some Polaroid too. They are about to make batteries for Tesla. I figure that's a good way to get in on the incremental game. I didn't need the register to tell me that. I was really looking for something more stable, in an investing climate where there is a lot of volatility.
The whole technology arena is a high risk / potentially high payoff game, especially with high valuations through much of the space because of market enthusiasm in recent years.
There was quite a bit of news in December about Toyota, their solid state battery progress, their claim that their first BEV would be out in mass production by mid-decade, utilizing their solid state battery tech. (implying they are very close to commercial success there), etc.
And unlike Tesla and Musk time, when Toyota makes a claim like that, it tends to be fairly credible. So for me, Toyota might be a more safe way to play in the battery space than Tesla or QS, but of course, the gains would be paltry in comparison for Toyota stock, since if wildly sucessful with BEV's, Toyota would mostly be replacing their ICE fleet over time.
OTOH, their success comes at the expense of QS and Tesla, which already have HUGE valuations by comparison re expectations, so there's that.
Looking at a chart of the previous month's trading, QS got hit hard Dec. 28th through Jan. 4th. So if that is the "big dump" you're referring to, that could have been some tax related gyrations and then the momentum follow-through, with the Toyota news providing the marginal inducement for QS longs to get out in enough numbers to move the stock. (Trying to figure these things out can be really hard -- I'm just taking a guess based on experience and intuition from 3 plus decades of trading on and off in various volatile tech.)
For perspective, my Yahoo chart shows it below $12 in early November, over $132 at the high, and at $54ish now, close to the recent lows over the past month (at that price scale). So how big a "deal" $50ish is, is a matter of perspective and timeframe.
And no, I never have ANY idea what a stock will do in the short run. I just try to look at where they've been, the overall news for the industry and related factors, and not lose my head getting too big to fast in any one stock. Different approaches work for different folks.
Like bitcoin, if enthusiasm wanes greatly and they get relatively cheap compared to prices over the past year or so, I'll take a much more serious look, and at more recent news.