Julie Hyman, Myles Udland and Brian Sozzi of Yahoo Finance analyze Hindenburg’s report on electric vehicles.
Video transcription
JULIE HYMAN: Let’s take a look at the future here today, because, of course, we have records for the S&P 500 and NASDAQ yesterday. Today, however, we are seeing a retraction in these indexes, or rather, with a license, we saw records at S&P and Dow yesterday. The Dow went up another 1/10 of 1% in terms of futures here this morning.
But we were seeing some interesting moves. And a sector of them helps to explain, at least, why NASDAQ futures are down. I’m talking about electric vehicle manufacturers. There was a fire at a Tesla plant in Fremont, California. And that seems to be putting some pressure on those actions. It does not appear that there was much damage, or at least no injuries were reported, it is unclear what the damage might be.
And there is an EV charging station company called ChargePoint that reported results year after year. Therefore, these shares are being traded at a low level. So Tesla’s shares came under pressure, ChargePoint and some of the others came under pressure.
And then, folks, there’s the case of Lordstown Motor. And I know that we are all reading with great interest this morning, Hindenburg with a brief report on Lordstown. Brian Sozzi, they didn’t get around to this report, basically saying the company’s manufacturing orders.
BRIAN SOZZI: Yes, the headline here, and you are watching Lordstown’s stock drop close to 20% in the pre-market is, Hindenburg observing, in quotes, Lordstown is an over-the-counter electric vehicle SPAC and no salable product, which we believe to have misled investors on both their demand and their production capacity. Well, this is a very long report. I’m still going through this.
But in this report, Hindenburg cites an interview that the CEO, Lordstown CEO Steve Burns gave on our network on February 23, stating that they have already sold 100,000 electric pickups. Now, Hindenburg argues that point, saying that these orders, this order book, consist of, quotes, false or totally non-binding orders, which we note have contacted the Lordstown Motors team to comment on the report. We are still going through this.
But then again, this is Hindenburg, Myles, flexing his muscles, the same company that brought Nikola down last year and really caused the stock price to wobble here and finally brought down the founder, Trevor Milton, but here, Lordstown is now under the Hindenburg fire.
MYLES UDLAND: Yes, and just in the case of Hindenburg, they are very good at what they are trying to do, which is to create a great reaction, not only in actions, but also to create a great title that people talk about. And I think a perhaps interesting echo boom of what we saw on the market will be if you think it’s someone like Edwin Dorsey in the bear’s cave, which Hindenburg is doing.
We talked to Dan David at Wolfpack Research. There are many people now in the short space of activists. And I think they believe that there are a lot of opportunities out there, not just with Nikola and now Lordstown, as you said, Sozzi. But I think this will be an interesting part of the market’s history as we move forward here in the coming years.
JULIE HYMAN: And it’s also interesting at that point, by the way, you know, you saw people like Andrew Left, who was a notable short sales researcher, who gave up on short sales calls entirely after the whole GameStop meme stock situation. Obviously, some of these other guys are not intimidated and continue with these calls.