Today Plug Power shares climbed as much as 6.18% to $1.89 per share on the back of heavy trading volume early in the day. The hydrogen fuel cell system provider’s stock has climbed more than 11% this week alone, with most of those gains coming yesterday and today.
Last month, Plug Power shares tumbled after disappointing second quarter earnings results, which suggested that things are not turning around yet as some analysts said before then.
Plug Power average trading volume passed early
Plug Power’s average daily trading volume was 2.98 million, according to Google Finance, but 4.13 million shares had already changed hands today by 1:15 p.m. Eastern. Because of this heavy volume, Trade-Ideals LLC named the company a “strong on high relative volume” candidate this morning, according to a post on The Street. By 10 a.m., 1.3 million shares of Plug Power had already been traded, and at that time, the average dollar volume according to average daily share volume times share price was $3.5 million.
Also at that time, Plug Power shares were trading at more than 4.5 times their usual rate at that time of day.
Why this is important
According to Trade-Ideas, investors should watch the candidates it names as “strong on high relative volume” stocks because such a huge change in volume moves signals that there is some kind of underlying activity going on. Among the possibilities are mergers and acquisitions “material” news about the stock, upgrades from analysts or buying by so-called “super-investors” or company insiders.
The firm also states that a surge in trading volume like this could indicate that hedge funds or momentum traders are snapping up shares before a catalyst.
Plug Power sets up GenKey financing arm
News on Plug Power has been rather thin of late. There weren’t any filings posted by the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. Today the company announced that CEO Andy Marsh is attending the grand opening of a distribution center owned by Home Depot, one of their customers.
Other than that, Plug Power announced on Monday that it is setting up a new capital financing unit for its GenKey customers. However, that news didn’t really affect the company’s share price as a significant percentage move wasn’t noticed until Thursday.
