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This week, Ford’s all-electric F-150 Lightning was named North American Truck of the Year.
Courtesy of Ford
The outlook for the car market in 2023 is uncertain, but that isn’t stopping investors from piling into
Ford Motor
shares.
Ford
(ticker: F) stock is up 23 cents, or 1.9%, at $13.48 in midday trading Thursday. The
S&P 500
and
Dow Jones Industrial Average
are up about 0.9% and 0.7%, respectively.
With Thursday’s gain, Ford stock has risen for 10 consecutive trading sessions, climbing almost 23% over that span. This marks the stock’s best 10-day stretch since early August 2022, when shares rose 22.9% over a 10-day span, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Ford stock is now up about 16% so far this year, which is surprising given some of Wall Street’s concerns about the car market as a possible recession looms. In fact, Ford is also one of the least popular car stocks on Wall Street, with just 38% of analysts rating it Buy, compared with an average S&P 500 Buy-rating ratio of 58%.
Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney wrote Tuesday evening “the weak macro backdrop [will] make for a challenging and choppy fundamental [car] environment in 2023.”
Delaney has a lot of questions headed into the new year, including whether auto makers can maintain profit margins as production recovers. Auto sales in the U.S. fell about 8% year over year in 2022. New car sales amounted to just under 14 million, according to auto data provider Cox Automotive. That’s the lowest level since 2011, when the industry was still…
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