Death of My RE & EV Stock

I have a Roth IRA account I manage myself. It's not large and I try to be careful with my money: Make it as diverse as possible, invest in some Blue Chips and some tech Unicorns, and companies that work for improving our future, such as renewable energy and electric or hybrid vehicles. With those high-risk companies, I try to invest only what I could lose without regret ($200-500) or offset with other more reliable investments.

I was an early small investor in Tesla. In 2014, when it was still possible to buy its vanity paper stock, I bought three shares at about $14 each. After multiple stock splits, I sold most of it in 2021 for a hefty $8K to buy my son a used car he still drives now. In 2024, after Musk endorsed Trump, I sold almost all of my Tesla stock, except for the one original paper share with Elon Musk's signature on it. Don't ask me why I still keep it - probably as a reminder of his good promises to improve humanity through technology.

In 2021, I bought 15 shares (at $22) of Peter Thiel's Palantir without knowing it was his company. I just stumbled upon it when I was doing my research on new tech companies for investment. It positioned itself as a data management company then. Once Palantir hit the news as a company owned by Thiel after the major pre-election alignment of billionaires, I sold the stock in June 2024 at slightly over $23. I made just a little bit of profit, after it had set in the red at $6-7 for almost three years and before it got heavily into AI and went through the roof. Right now it's steadily climbing up, trading at $158 today (July 25, 2025). Even though I could have made a lot more money on it selling it later, I don't regret unloading those shares last year. Just the idea of giving my money and helping Peter Thiel grow richer in any way revolts me.

My big disappointment were investments into some promising renewable energy and electric vehicle companies.

The first one was LDK Solar, a China-based solar wafer manufacturer that had a promising future and dominated the market in the early 2000s. I only bought three paper shares of it at $23 each in 2009 hoping it would recover from the down slide it started to experience. However, due to several compounding factors, such as global oversupply and price collapse, lack of demand and massive debt obligations, as well as subsidy cuts, the company had to restructure itself and ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2014. For a long time, its shares were sitting in the OTC Pink market at under one cent per share, and I still sat on them, curiously watching (non)movement for almost 5 years. In 2019, I got a notification that the company was liquidated. I still have those paper shares somewhere in my office. Here's the LDK Solar Ltd stock price history:

The second company is Lucid Group Inc. (LCID), a US manufacturer of luxury EVs. I bought my first three shares at $18 in May 2022, and continued buying them as they were losing value, hoping that one day they'd start rising again. They did at the end of Biden's term but now that Trump is moving away from the renewables and EVs back to oil and coal, it's trading steady at below $3. I am in the red with it but at this point it doesn't make sense selling the shares and I still hope that one day it will climb out of the hole. It's still making the beautifully designed cars and hopefully with people moving away from Teslas it will carve out a bigger market for itself.

The third one was particularly heart-breaking as it had so much promise to change the trucking business. I'm referring to Nikola Corp, a US manufacturer of long-haul electric and hydrogen trucks. I started buying its stock in 2022 when they were trading at about $200/share, and my last purchase was in February 2025 @ 54 cents. It also entered into the bankruptcy proceedings, earning itself the letter Q at the end of its ticker (NKLAQ) but I still hope that it will bounce back. Not only because I believe in the non-gas trucks but also because I think it's a much better nod to Nikola Tesla than Musk's Tesla.

Finally, I also have 65 shares of Sunnova Energy Intl Inc., another solar energy company that had a lot of promise. I started buying its stock at about $25 in 2020 and bought the last batch of 20 in April 2025, before it filed for bankruptcy. I just tried to buy 100 of it right now that it is in OTC market, and this is the message I received:

At some point, it was showing as having lost 100% of its value in my position. I don't hope that it will ever recover, again due to the major policy shifts on solar and renewables, so I'm just watching the stock shift from 99% to 100% value loss with almost medical morbid curiosity.

So here they are, sitting together (not)pretty in the deep red in my investment account:

Investment is indeed a high risk game. But I'm not worried about these losses because I do have investments in Ace Technology and TSM that offset these many times over.

I also had invested in Nio, a Chinese electric car manufacturer, but that should be a separate long story.