What happened
Hydrogen fuel cell leader Plug Power (PLUG +0.91%) had a big week last week, announcing multiple corporate partnerships to manufacture fuel cell parts, pioneer fuel cell use in airplanes, and bring to market a hydrogen-powered fuel cell van.
Plug's biggest news -- its prediction that revenues will leap to more than $800 million next year and more than triple that number over the following three years -- helped to raise analyst price targets and lift shares of Plug Power. It also sparked stock analyst initiations of peer fuel cell companies Ballard Power (BLDP +5.68%) and Bloom Energy (BE +5.12%) -- but not of FuelCell Energy (FCEL +3.05%).
Today, however, FuelCell stock is playing catch-up, rising 13.7% in 9:50 a.m. EDT trading.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
This really does appear to be the beginning and the end of FuelCell's story. Last week, Plug Power stock gained 14.9% on its positive prognostications for revenue. Ballard did even better, rising 15.3%, while Bloom Energy did only a bit worse -- up 10.3%. The best performer of all, though, was FuelCell Energy stock, which gained 15.6% last week on another company's news.
And investors today seem to be betting that FuelCell will continue to outperform this week.
Now what
Does that make sense? After all, FuelCell doesn't appear to have any good news of its own to report today. Its last quarterly earnings report came out a month ago, and while it was positive (FuelCell beat "earnings" expectations by 20%), the company still lost money for the quarter.
Hope that the stock will continue to outperform this week, therefore, in the absence of actual good news to catalyze a stock price rally, would appear to depend on some Wall Street firm or other deciding to upgrade or initiate coverage of -- or at least raise a price target on -- FuelCell stock, just as analysts did with all the other fuel cell stocks last week.
And yet, even if FuelCell does luck into such an upgrade (initiation or price target hike), it would likely remain what it is today: a company that hasn't earned a profit since 1997, and one with losses that have been growing for three years straight. That doesn't seem like a smart stock to bet on to me.
