As of the close New York today Ford Motor (F) shares were up 11.67% after the company announced it would nearly double production capacity to meet demand for its upcoming F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck.
The price of $24.31 is a 21-year high for Ford’s stock.
‘We are taking the capacity up to 150,000 Lightnings per year, and we will do that sometime in the middle of 2023,” Kumar Galhotra, Ford president of the Americas & International Markets Group, told Yahoo Finance.
The company has received nearly 200,000 non-binding reservations for the F-150 Lightning. As of Thursday January 5, reservation holders will be able to place actual orders for the truck.
Today’s surge takes Ford above the $22 a share target price I set for the stock when I added it to my Jubak Picks 12-18 month portfolio back on June 9, 2021. The stock is up 55% since then.
As of today, January 4, I’m raising my target price to $28 a share.
It’s hard to set a target price for Ford now because the stock had been down for so long and the rally in the shares has been so rapid that there really aren’t any meaningful technical indicators on the chart.
I think that the actual conversion fro reservations to orders will give the stock another boost, hence the new and higher price target.
The big danger out there for Ford–and all other car makers (and sellers of consumer goods with price tags that require financing)–is that Federal Reserve interest rate increases will raise the cost of loans to buy a car. I think the danger point from the Fed is still down the road and I expect that car companies will do everything they can to offer financing deals that offset the initial stages of any increase in interest rates. (Ford also has to borrow money to finance its capital spending plans.)
So yes, it’s worth holding onto Ford for a while yet. But this isn’t a forever stock.
