What are the current avenues for us regular people to invest in companies doing battery R&D? I found the lgclf stock, but that doesn’t seem right from my low knowledge level.
One place to start might be the companies mentioned on the Lithium Ion Battery page on Wikipedia. A lot of the same major players show up again and again in these sorts of factory deals and discussions, such as: LG Chem (mentioned here; also a major partner with some of the German automakers on the European continent), Panasonic (partner in Tesla's Gigafactory), Sony (a traditional player in battery chem and essentially the originator of commercialized Lithium Ion tech in the first place), Toshiba (another traditional player).
Invest in Tesla? They have made several acquisitions related to battery R&D and are likely moving to producing their own batteries.
That’s one way, for sure. But that stock is already well known.
I'm not sure if it is still true but up until the past month or two Tesla was the most shorted stock in the market and you couldn't watch CNBC for 30 minutes w/o a talking head positing that it would go bankrupt before the year was out. Fast forward to today and every automaker is falling all over themselves to copy the Tesla model and Tesla has positive cash flow and $5.3 billion cash on hand.
Not the most shorted, but up there. It was #50 on a list back in August (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4285222-heavily-shorted-sto...). Today it has dropped off that list: its short ratio is still 20% but the bottom of that list is now at 24%. That 20% figure has been relatively constant.
Top of the list: GameStop, followed by Bed Bath & Beyond.
I love how almost every company on that list has a market cap around $1 billion, and then there is Tesla with a market cap over $40 billion.
Also has almost twice the cap of Ford.
Enterprise Value (market cap + debt) is the true measure of what the market thinks a company is worth. By that measure, Ford is 3X the size of Tesla.