The FT Alphaville x Due Diligence Spac spreadsheet

Back in January, FT Alphaville sensed a disturbance in the force.

The stocks of electric vehicle companies, alongside any business tangentially related to the practice of replacing a combustion engine with a whopping great battery, were absolutely roofing it. Market open after market open — whether it was gravity-propelled EV truckmaker Nikola, sector pin-up Tesla or speculative solid state battery play Quantumscape — the stonks ripped, often in double digit percentage moves.

Now, as you might imagine, as soon as FT Alphaville spots a modicum of bubbly-behaviour a sense of weariness takes over. Given we’ve been trying to call the top in various asset classes since, well, as long as we can remember, there’s now a deep caution to calling a top. Maybe because for many of the names, we’ve been hopelessly wrong (others less so, granted). But this time it felt different — the market had a certain terrible cadence to it, as if millions of short sellers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

So the FT Alphaville’s Electric Vehicle Bubble Watch™ was born. Our timing could not have been better. Since then, the EV stocks have shed some $800bn in market capitalisation, or nearly 50 per cent of their peak valuations. That’s around the value of ten — yes ten — General Motors. Oooof.

Naturally, the suited and booted deal hound dogs at the FT’s popular Due Diligence newsletter were amused by the spreadsheet. Having reported on some of these names coming to market over 2020, often via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, watching them trade proved a popular spectator sport.

Yet, there was no master sheet of the non-electric vehicle Spacs for either FT Alphaville or the Due Diligence team to refer to when in need of a quick market update. So when Due Diligence city slicker Arash Massoudi asked FT Alphaville to prep a similar document to our EV spreadsheet late last week, we thought it would prove valuable to both our sets of readers. Even if a lot of the stocks are already in the process of unwinding.

So, may we present to you, The Due Diligence x FT Alphaville Spac Master Sheet, complete with deal completion dates, returns since and key financial information such as valuation, forward revenues and trailing ebitda.

Some quick housekeeping. We’ve only included the uncompleted mergers for the big 3 Spac deal sponsors: Warren Buffett wannabe Chamath Palihapitiya, seasoned pro Michael Klein and buyout specialist Alec Gores, with the rest of the sheet populated by the companies who have completed mergers. However, we’re not sure this list is complete by any means, so if you spot a name missing do let us know.

Regardless, the sheet doesn’t make for pretty reading does it? Chamath’s Spacs have been particularly crushed, with Richard Branson boyhood fantasy vehicle Virgin Galactic down 74 per cent from its all-time high. Never mind though, as Chamath managed to exit his personal stake in the company at the beginning of March. Talk about market timing.

Anyway thoughts, additions and criticisms welcome as ever in the comments. And, if you’re brave enough, to my email. Enjoy.