Nvidia passes $1T in value, Ford & ChargePoint upgrades: Stocks to watch

Yahoo Finance Live takes a look at several stocks trending after Tuesday's closing bell.

Video transcript

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SEANA SMITH: All right, let's take a look at some of the individual movers today. One of the big stories we got to talk about, NVIDIA shares are rising. Closing up just about 3% in today's trading session, after the company surpassed the $1 trillion market cap evaluation.

Just briefly though, the surge in NVIDIA stock comes following this AI craze that we have certainly seen play out, not only an NVIDIA stock here, Akiko, over the last several trading days but also in a number of its competitors, a number of names that even mentioned the words AI in their earnings call are getting some of the love that investors-- and some of the excitement that investors are feeling surrounding AI, right now.

We're just talking to John Vinh from KeyBank last hour, and he was just talking about the first mover advantage that NVIDIA clearly has within this space. And he thinks are going to be able to maintain that first mover advantage for at least five years.

AKIKO FUJITA: You talk about AI being the buzzword. We heard every company kind of sprinkle that around their earnings calls. But it feels like we're starting to see a bit of a differentiation within the market on who exactly is a real competitor in this space. Now, there's obviously sort of the companies like the Microsofts and Alphabet's who are really building out these applications. But in the chip space, it is all about NVIDIA to your point.

At the same time, investors looking at some of their competitors because of the run-up that we've seen. And you see some of the names there. John Vinh, earlier, talking about Broadcom as one, AMD, another one, and then Marvell technology. They're down today but we did see a significant upside last week on the back of their earnings call as well. So a lot of these names kind of riding the coattails of NVIDIA on the explosive opportunity investors see right now, at least, when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Well, Ford shares driven to the upside as positive reviews of the company's capital markets day continue to roll in from Wall Street. Jefferies upgrading the stock from hold to buy after gaining confidence in Ford's new strategy following its investor event last week. The firm noting it expects sequential improvements across divisions for the carmaker.

And you know, Seana, we talked about this last week, Ford being sort of a tale of two companies, in a way. There's the legacy side of things that are continuing to churn the profit for the company, but the EV side is really the big bet, and it is very much a company still in transition.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, and that's really starting to resonate with investors. When you take a look at the reaction that we've seen since the announcements from Ford last week, and then following up their investor event with the announcement that they made with Tesla last week, which we certainly saw a lot of-- yes, I'm sorry-- with Tesla last week, which certainly caused a lot of excitement within that stock, talking about the new partnership that they are going to have with Tesla.

When it comes to their charging station, Tesla has more than 12,000 superchargers across the US and Canada. Obviously, the many on the street are looking at this as good news not only for Ford and Tesla but really for widespread EV adoption.

We know range anxiety has certainly been one of the main focal points as to why we haven't seen, maybe, more rapid adoption of EVs. So as we get more access to chargers, more EVs with the access to Tesla's install base that it already has, clearly, Ford is one of the names that could benefit from that. We're looking at gains of 4% today.

Let's take a look at shares of ChargePoint, one of the trending tickers here on Yahoo Finance. It moved higher after Bank of America upgraded the stock to a buy. Also cited, the company is well positioned to capitalize on industry and regulatory tailwinds. They're talking about the need for more EV Chargers in that Bank of America note.

They also said that they think that the outlook here, quote, "remains a simple correlation to EV sales, which we expect will continue." And they name it one of the best in-class ways to play the growing adoption of EVs, Akiko.

AKIKO FUJITA: Yes, 70% market share when we talk about EV Chargers. It's going to be an interesting one here though because remember last week, we were talking about Tesla having that tie up with Ford, so now Ford EVs can charge at superchargers for Tesla. That's going to be a direct competitor to ChargePoint.

But as of now, ChargePoint still very much the center of the charging infrastructure here. And Bank of America specifically saying they are reassessing the line of sight-to-cash inflection saying they've got a proven commodity here. And they believe, along with EV adoption, ChargePoint will continue to drive that transition.