Please forgive me for this post. It is not my typical fare. As you may know I have been a long time Daily Kos poster having started in 2006. My second post was titled “On Flexible Fuel Plug-in Hybrids”. Most of my posts have been on various aspects of electric vehicles and alternative/green energy. These are my thoughts about a misstep that the “smart money” of Wall Street seem to be making that could be a great advantage for the people who follow electric vehicle threads here on Daily Kos.
I'm not a big stock owner or day trader or financial consultant or anything like that. However, I have been involved with electric vehicles (EVs) since before they were a thing. I had one of only a handful of electric vehicles in the mid-Atlantic region around Washington, DC around the end of the previous century way before any manufacturer committed to mass-producing them. I drove my yellow solar paneled electric sports car conversion to every demonstration I could, so that I could to tell people and politicians about the advantages of EVs. Not being a scientist or engineer I mainly talked about my personal experience owning and using an EV. I knew about Tesla before most people, because I knew about the company from where Tesla's technology came from, AC Propulsion and its yellow tZero.
(the reason why I had my converted Pontiac, Fiero painted yellow) Unfortunately, I was too poor during the early days of Tesla to invest, despite urging my readers on the website we activist used to coordinate the protests to stop GM from crushing the EV1, then on EVWorld.com, and the Daily Kos to invest in entrepreneurs trying to get an EV product out onto the market. For those who had the money, saw Tesla and listened that investment turned out unimaginably well.
For those who saw Tesla's success but missed out, the hunt is on. Now everyone seems to be chasing what they believe will be the next Tesla. I remind you that before Tesla there have been hundreds of attempts to start the next American automaker, both gasoline and electric, without success. Just like Ford was in the early days of the automobile, Tesla is a special case not easily repeated. Tesla and Elon Musk had that rare thing that makes a market disruption possible.
However, there was something else that investors who missed investing in Ford could have done as a residual opportunity. That opportunity was something created by Ford selling millions of Model Ts, and that was to investment in oil companies. (HOLD IT! I’m talking about the past and about the nature of residual opportunity. I would never invest in oil today. It goes against my values in so many ways.) - Note: both Ford and the oil companies were closely held private businesses and the order of how they went public is unlike what happens today. I'm using them as more of an example rather than a full historical recounting of how they went public.
Let me remind you that before Ford and the other automobile makers popularized internal combustion engine cars and sold them everywhere, gasoline was something that formed naturally at the top of oil reservoirs and typically had to be burned-off at the wellhead, before getting to what the oil companies really wanted, which was kerosine at the time. With millions of cars drinking away the naturally occurring gasoline, oil companies had to figure out how to make everything they extracted from their oil wells into gasoline. They figured this out and
we call it refining.
There was one fortunate aspects of the primary product for the oil companies. Gasoline was a consumable that was used up. In fact it gets used up rather fast and then car owners, like all those who bought Ford Model Ts, have to go back to buy more gasoline. The constant repeat customers and the wide profit margins eventually grew oil companies to be bigger than Ford, and the other car companies. Oil companies quickly evolved to control the entire supply chain. That is extraction, pipelines, refinement, distribution and dispensation.
Currently electricity is like the “crude oil” of EVs. There are multiple thousands of electric utility companies. However, because of utility regulations, electric codes, plug standards and different levels for dispensing electricity it is my belief that the new “oil companies” in the new EV economy are the companies who provide charging equipment that allow EVs to access electricity, whether they do it from the grid or other distributed or emissions free renewable sources. EV charger companies often collect some type of fee for their service.
I'm thinking that electric vehicle charging station companies are much more valuable, especially when you think of them in the future, than what is being reflected, IMHO, in their current stock prices. Remember, I'm not a stock analyst or some type of stock expert. I'm just a guy who knows EVs, and has been involved in their promotion since before the EV1 and Tesla.
One of the best examples of what I think are depressed EV charging station company stock prices is ChargePoint. Look at this from Wikipedia. “ChargePoint operates the largest online network of independently owned EV charging stations operating in 14 countries and makes the technology used in it.” In the statement above Wikipedia states that ChargePoint is “...the LARGEST online network of independently owned EV charging stations operating in 14 countries....” If I'm right and charging companies are the modern equivalent of what oil companies were in the old days, ChargePoint, being the largest charging company, is the equivalent to me of what Getty was before its antitrust breakup, or at least what ExxonMobil is today.
But there is more to ChargePoint than just being the biggest. For one, ChargePoint is no spring chicken. It was founded in 2007, giving it 14 years of experience in charging infrastructure. ChargePoint has had plenty of time to learn and adjust in its niche to become, as I see it, a solid company. It is not a company created to take advantage of the spoils of a lawsuit, or a big money newborn that dazzles but has no substance. ChargePoint has substance with around 30,000 charging locations and over 100,000 chargers installed, and it keeps growing faster and faster. It is not a niche inside a niche either. ChargePoint has charging solutions from soup to nuts. Covering the entire spectrum ChargePoint has from home chargers all the way to large fast DC chargers equipped with large batteries that shift their load on the grid to off peak hours. With such a wide product line ChargePoint has the products to serve individuals, utilities, private companies, government agencies and much more.
What's more is that all of its products come with software for its charger owners. They provide maintenance for their stations as part of their service. Their charging stations are also listed on their searchable live network database so that EV drivers can find the stations via smartphone apps, and through these apps an EV driver can find out whether the particular charging station is being used, off line, a private station not available to the public, or available. My personal experience with ChargePoint has been flawless. I have never had a problem getting a charge from any of their stations, which is not the case with other brands I have used.
Given all of the above, why did CHPT (ChargePoint's stock symbol) drop below $20 a share recently? I don't understand why the “big money” on Wall Street hadn't buoyed the stock at least above its lesser competitors. Once it dropped below $20 I went to jump in with a little money I had. Being a little guy it took me some time to secure the stock and by that time I was able to get the stock it had gone up. I was still happy with my purchase because I feel in my heart that the company is much more valuable than what is currently being reflected in its stock price. A few days later CNBC reported, “President Joe Biden is prioritizing a national EV charging network under his $2 trillion infrastructure bill, promising to have at least 500,000 of the devices installed across the U.S. By 2030.” CHPT stock went up on the news. I was happy. But it soon started on its way down again. A little while later it was back to just below $20 again, and then it started to climb again. It seems that dropping passed the $20 mark triggers a buying spree. It makes no sense, as little on Wall Street does. In my opinion ChargePoint is still a really good value as a stock. When comparing market control to market cap with other charging company stocks, in my opinion, CHPT should be at a much higher price. My guess is that it will go up in the future to a level that at least matches the values of other stock in this space.
I don't know why the big Wall Street supposed smart money doesn't see this as a fantastic investment opportunity. Also, in my opinion, if you are looking for the next Tesla-like investment don't bother with finding another stand alone EV manufacture. Instead what I believe we should do is look for the opportunities that having EVs on the roads in ever larger numbers creates. My bet is on the proverbial “oil companies,” of the new paradigm in the transportation economy of EVS. For me these are the companies that provide EV charging.
I'm providing this investment opinion because from my years of experience with alternative energy never have I had such a clear example of Wall Street being so asleep at the switch. For me CHPT stock in particular isn't valued correctly. Unlike trying to just stick it to short sellers, hedge-fund managers, big Wall Street and the supposed Wall Street smart money, this investment, I believe, will be a good investment over the long run. This, in my opinion, is a buy and hold stock, at least for a year or more. This stock will go up in value and stay if held long enough for when EVs take a considerable portion of the personal transportation market, something that I believe will happen in the next year to couple of years. I believe CHPT stock will be worth many times the investment if the investment is put in now. Again, I’m not a Wall Street commentator, stock analyst, institutional investor or anything like that. I'm not a day trader or stock junky with my head buried in stock market reports and armed with all of the confusing lingo that goes on with being hyper focused on investments. I don't have any inside information of the companies I've talked about here, or do I have any knowledge of anything going well or bad with these companies. I'm as blind as the next guy to internal workings, management problems or financial trouble that any of these companies may be having. I do own ChargePoint stock as I've stated in the post. I am, however, a person knowledgeable about the EV space and a somewhat regular poster to the Daily Kos just looking to pass on what I’m seeing to my fellow readers of the Daily Kos.