Some haywire moves higher in money-losing electric vehicle makers such as Rivian and Lucid hint at the stock market forming an unhealthy bubble, argues Matt Maley, Miller Tabak chief markets strategist.
"It's just a sign of an unhealthy stock market," Maley said on Yahoo Finance Live.
That may be an understatement.
While Rivian's stock price (RIVN) plunged 15% to close at $146.07 on Wednesday, shares at one point on Tuesday were more than double the company's IPO pricing of $78 from last week. The stock hit an intraday high of $179.47 Tuesday, according to Yahoo Finance Plus data.
For perspective, Rivian's market cap at its peak eclipsed that of auto giant Volkswagen. Rivian has barely shipped any of its electric trucks, and has lost more than $2.4 billion from 2019 through 2021.
Fellow electric vehicle maker Lucid (LCID) isn't too far behind Rivian in terms of an explosive stock price of late.
Lucid's stock has surged 118% inside of a month, with the latest push higher coming amid upbeat order data shared this week. Shares also closed down 5% Wednesday. Similar to Rivian, the company is also losing a great deal of money as it ramps up its production capacity to meet initial consumer demand.
At a market cap of $85 billion, newcomer Lucid has a higher market cap than Ford ($79 billion) and nearly General Motors ($93 billion).
Some strategists like Maley think the eye-popping gains in Rivian and Lucid underscore the continued high levels of liquidity in the market, in large part fueled by low interest rates.
Explains Maley, "Just like 1999 when Amazon [stock] got way, way, way ahead of itself — it's a great company and changed the world — but the stock had to come down. I am not saying we are going to have the same problems next year that we had in 200 with a major bear market. But this market is being run by liquidity, and much less so than on economic growth or earnings growth. This liquidity is going to become less plentiful and people need to be preparing for how they will react when this market starts to come down at point. It's inevitable, and I think will come down at some point in the next 12 months."
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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