Ballard Power is a potentially interesting case study

My recent return to doing EW charting in blog format began with a post on Ballard Power in which I had picked up for 85 cents per share based on my read of the EW chart.  I bailed on Ballard as I said I would in this post from June 16th.  I sold for $2.06 at a time when I figured I had caught the big part of the 3rd wave.  On the Ballard Yahoo chat board I told everyone back in Oct it was likely going down to at least the 61.8 fib and perhaps all the way down to 90 cents.

Well, it did get to the 61.8 fib and then it had a nice bounce.  But I bet that was a sucker's bounce and that the 5th wave of an expanding triangle just finished.  There is only one real reason why I don't think that the 61.8 fib retracement was the bottom (2nd) wave: it would have meant that C was shorter than A and that is not supposed to be possible in EW modeling.

What would shake out the most hands right now would be 5 waves down to below the 61.8 to the bottom of the expanding triangle/wizard's sleeve/megaphone (there are many common names for an expanding triangle).  But if that happens then I think buyers could be treated to a fat payday in the form of a 3rd wave up in which short sellers would be chasing it exponentially as they cover.  Remember, if a 3rd wave does happen per the red line going up (or even before then), it will likely be more powerful than the 1st wave up, and that was a doozy in terms of quick percentage gains.  If wave 2 petered out at 90 cents then I would guess wave 3 would go up to $3 and it would do so very quickly with gaps up.

This is one of those that you play with a grand or two just for fun.  I would not bet the farm on this simply because it could also turn out to be a mania which locks your money up for a long time.  I don't think that will be the case though because Ballard is starting to get traction in the news and electric vehicles still don't have good battery tech yet.  A car that would use either a fuel cell pack or a battery pack which could be user swapped would be really exciting IMO.

What people really want is to use battery for around town but for long trips they need the ability to run fossil fuels.  But they don't want to pay for both infrastructures (internal combustion and batteries) all the time.  The part you are not using is costing you fuel mileage.  But if a car like the Nissan leaf (all electric) could be usually battery but sometimes fuel cell (with on-board gasoline->H2 reformer) then you would have the best of both worlds.  While this is not on the roadmap right now, I often find that by the time I think of something, someone else who can credibly deliver it is less than 6 months from announcing or delivering it.  In other words, it's already obvious to people in the business.  Bottom line, I think Ballard has a good chance of taking off once again at some point.  Probably a much higher chance of that than of going BK.  None of this really matters for the short term though.  The charts are all that matter for short term traders.