What happened
What went up is coming back down. After soaring in Tuesday trading, shares of hydrogen fuel cell stocks Plug Power (PLUG 7.03%) and Bloom Energy (BE 5.20%) are coming back down on Wednesday -- falling 5% and 2.3%, respectively through 10:20 a.m. EST. Similarly, Chinese electric-car maker Kandi Technologies (KNDI -1.80%) is suffering an 8.4% sell-off.
There's little news to explain it, however.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
Oh, macroeconomically speaking, there's some bad news today: 778,000 new unemployment claims filed in the last week. That's worse than analysts had predicted, but hardly surprising with new coronavirus infections surging and lockdowns starting to slam back in place.
However, there doesn't appear to be any particularly bad news on the fuel cell front today, with no analyst downgrades nor price targets nor negative press releases from the companies themselves in evidence. Casting about for a reason that alternative energy stocks are going down today, our friends at StreetInsider.com this morning essentially shrugged their shoulders and said it could be profit taking.
Now what
And that may well be the right answer for why Plug Power stock and Bloom Energy are going down today.
Over the past month, shares of Plug stock have soared 76% and Bloom Energy is up 62%. If profit taking is the reason investors are selling today, well, there certainly have been more than enough profits for the taking to justify such a move. (More encouragingly for long-term investors, having taken and counted up those profits, I suspect greed will draw the traders back to Plug and Bloom Energy stocks for more profits before too long.)
In the case of Kandi, on the other hand, I'd beg to differ with StreetInsider, because while profit taking is certainly one viable answer to why the stock is down today (Kandi shares have literally doubled over the past month), there's a bit of real news here as well:
Just yesterday, Kandi announced that it has closed a sale of 8.8 million shares of common stock, with attached warrants to buy even more shares (each "unit" sold comprises one share and one warrant to buy 0.4 share at a later date for $14.50). Kandi sold all these units for $11.30 apiece -- well below the stock's current share price of $13 and change. Granted, this is not really "new" news, as Kandi first announced the sale back on Friday, but being reminded of just how steep a discount Kandi sold its shares for last week may have given investors a shock today.
