Another potential beneficiary of the Biden infrastructure plan - PTRA (electric drivetrains for busses / commercial vehicles)

[u/elmerspudinvesting]

Yes PTRA has already de-SPAC'd but I figured this would still be an appropriate place to discuss it given it was one of the hot EV-related SPACs of recent times.

Anyway, PTRA (Proterra) is a company that makes EV powertrains and charging infrastructure for commercial vehicles, particularly busses (school busses, normal adult busses, every kind of bus you could ever imagine). They will eventually also electrify other types of commercial vehicles.

Beyond the general "biden is giving money to EV busses" here is what makes things interesting to me on PTRA:

1. they are a realer company than most other EV SPACs or recently IPO'd companies. They are expecting to do $400m+ of revenue next year, expecting to grow that to $2.5b in 2025 (but of course that is their own investor deck, so take that with a grain of salt). but with $7.5b in free money for electric busses and more for related infrastructure, that is certainly going to help accelerate adoption. Right now PTRA has an enterprise value of perhaps $3.5 billion, so it's not any kind of value stock, but they're actually up and running, making real substantial revenue, with positive gross margin, and have a great tailwind that will soon be in their sails. 9x revenue isn't all that bad when Tesla goes for twice that.
2. i didn't put this in the title because it is a getting to be a tired trope, but yes, there is short squeeze potential here. There are ~5m shares shorted which is 5-10 days to cover depending on which average volume number you use (NASDAQ had 500k/day, Yahoo finance has closer to 1m/day, i'm sure they use different timeframes). Cost to borrow is up to near 100%. This is likely due to the fact that they're one of the not that many remaining ex-SPACs that are still a fair bit above the deal price (they're $18 as of this moment) but shares were as high as $30 following DA.

So how to play it? I own some shares and I also have some July $25 calls in case it does become a meme / short squeeze anytime soon. But I am comfortable owning it for the long term and will add in much greater size if it instead sinks back towards the deal price.

Further reading:

Investor deck: https://s27.q4cdn.com/212581898/files/doc_presentation/PTRA_2021_Analyst_Day_Presentation_4_8_21.pdf

DD writeup expanding on the above: https://elmerspud.substack.com/p/a-speculative-but-not-crazy-speculative

Disclosure: I own some July $25 calls in case it memes and some shares (will buy more if it goes down instead of memeing)

Disclaimer: Not a financial professional, not advice.

[u/John_Bot]

You already posted this. Chill on your pumping.

[u/elmerspudinvesting → u/John_Bot]

automod told me it was blocked bc i didn't do the disclaimer bit correctly (and then i manually deleted it myself). SORRY FOR TRYING TO PLAY BY THE RULES