Three out-of-the-box ways to trade the rise of electric vehicles in 2022

Investors may want to look under the radar for electric vehicle plays in the year ahead, two traders say.

With popular stocks such as Tesla and Nikola reaching exorbitant valuations, “we’re trying to play around the edges,” Laffer Tengler Investments’ Nancy Tengler told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Thursday.

“There’s two ways for investors to nibble around the sides of the EV market,” the firm’s chief investment officer said. “One is Borgwarner.”

A $10.5 billion auto-parts manufacturer, Borgwarner is on track to supply around 30% of powertrains, or electric motors, to the EV industry by 2023, Tengler said. It’s also lagging the market this year, up less than 13%, and trades at a relatively cheap forward price-to-earnings ratio of 11, she said.

“The second way is copper, maybe a name like Freeport-McMoRan, some of the miners that are going to be providing the supply to the EV makers,” Tengler said.

A third tangential market could see a big reversal in 2022, Joule Financial Chief Investment Officer Quint Tatro said in the same interview.

Charging-station stocks Blink and ChargePoint could get a huge windfall from the roughly $7.5 billion in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan allotted to the industry, Tatro said.

Blink and ChargePoint shares are down 33% and 52% year to date, respectively.

“These are stocks that we think are going through some tax-loss selling into the new year and I think these are going to be interesting trade opportunities as we enter January,” Tatro said.

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