Insider Stock Grants: CLNE - First Price-Based Performance Grant! Long Term Play'ish

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CLNE - Clean Energy Fuels

So I did some scraping on the SEC EDGAR forms and noticed this wonderful company which never before provided a FIRST EVER Price-Based Performance Grant for all of their executives.

I thought this was interesting and wanted all my fellow Lords and Valkyries to join my future adorned pleasure boat of Tendies.

Now you ask, Castle-kun (UwU), What is CLNE? What do they do?

Well here is what seeking alpha has on them:

Clean Energy Fuels Corp. provides natural gas as an alternative fuel for vehicle fleets and related fueling solutions, primarily in the United States and Canada. It supplies renewable natural gas (RNG), compressed natural gas (CNG), and liquefied natural gas (LNG) for light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles; and offers operation and maintenance services for public and private vehicle fleet customer stations. The company also designs, builds, operates, and maintains fueling stations; sells and services compressors and other equipment that are used in fueling stations; and provides assessment, design, and modification solutions to offer operators with code-compliant service and maintenance facilities for natural gas vehicle fleets. In addition, it transports and sells CNG and LNG through virtual natural gas pipelines and interconnects; procures and sells RNG; sells tradable credits, such as RNG and conventional natural gas as a vehicle fuel comprising Renewable Identification Numbers and Low Carbon Fuel Standards credits; enables its customers to acquire and finance natural gas vehicles; and obtains federal, state and local credits, grants, and incentives. The company serves heavy-duty trucking, airports, refuse, public transit, industrial, and institutional energy users, as well as government fleets. As of December 31, 2020, it served approximately 1,000 fleet customers operating approximately 48,000 vehicles; and owned, operated, or supplied approximately 565 fueling stations in 39 states in the United States and 5 provinces in Canada.

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Now the performance grant details:

  1. Form 4 → https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK=1368265&type=&dateb=&owner=include&start=0

All the executives just received a first-ever price-based performance grant. The current price is $6.23 and the only price-based requirement is that it reach $14 (just over a 100% increase). The CEO will receive 100,000 shares if they hit this goal which is a pretty sizeable $1.4M grant. (my only gripe with this is no date requirement… F… I love grants that have target date thresholds).

now what I noticed is this sneaky sneaky SNEAKY (I’ll share more sneakyness later from CLNE) little statement.

If you look at the individual Form 4s, you will see they also have a separate smaller grant that is only received if reach a “specific volume hurdle related to securing certain levels of gasoline gallon equivalent”.
I have only found one other time they had a similar performance grant was on 2019-02-25 and the stock went up 44% over the next month.

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  1. Holy Shit Balls - Stock Buy Back?!?! Count me in!
    https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1368265/000110465921147197/tm2134512d2_8k.htm
    The board also agreed to increase the company’s share repurchase program from a cap of $30M to $50M

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Now earlier I said about how sneaky these executives were:
Back in Jan 22nd 2021, They moved up a typical earnings grant forward by 1 month before earnings release. Prior to this fast forward grant, the stock was absolutely tearing it up (300% in 3 months). So moving the grant might be meaning they are bearish(?) about the firm?
Form 4 - https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own-disp?action=getissuer&CIK=0001368265&type=&dateb=&owner=include&start=80
HELL NAH they werent. They signed a new deal, and had a FIRMLY GRASPED and BURSTING earnings report that saw that stock go from $10 - $18 in a very short period of time.

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Soooooo… with that said, I am not good with charts (yet) and I am looking to enter into this Cleanest of Stonks the next couple of days. They have been gapping down to around $5.88 couple days ago and rebounded nicely. I’m going to buy maybe a 1k shares and fuggedaboutit.

Also, some bullish fucking news / Catalyst is they signed a new NG deal.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211216005364/en/

If anyone has any chart experience or have any other input, feel free to chime in! So come ride the tendie wave to my future pleasure boat.

This has been my Ted Talk.

Thanks,

Castle.

Edit 1.
Forgot to mention, CLNE had several Reddit Sentiments in 2021 with one degenerate betting big 3 months ago and coming out wetter, stronger and sexier.

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Seems interesting and maybe worth a few shares for a swing after its recent sell off. The only thing I’m kinda wary about is this stock performance grant not having a date requirement. What I do like is them working with Port of LA and Long Beach for cleaner energy given that we’re kind of in a clean energy bubble. Could be a 2022 play tho, not very experienced in the energy sector so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt.

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I read your DD and I like that you are posting as we always encourage everyone to get more involved. My first reaction on this though is it was a heavily pumped stock, memish all over reddit and twitter for a while. You can tell almost instantly by looking how the chart has been over the last year. This stock recently had price targets of 16, then 11, but has dropped more since then. If I was going to play this I would wait for the bottom. Very easily could return back to sub 5 like it was trading for the previous 5 years. Showing previous Yolo’s should not reflect how a stock may move in the future and should be avoided in DD. It feels like this DD came straight from WSB. It also recently jumped because the whole market did, like SPY and trended up after the rate hike was paused for this month but they are all already coming back down. I don’ mean any of this in a bad way or to poke fun, I just don’t want you or anyone else to lose money. I can often be wrong about DD, just have your stop losses in place and don’t put in more than you should. It could work at this level, I would just wait for a confirmed bottom because I don’t see it in this chart yet and this feels like a bad meme play that already ran.

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Thanks JB. Completely understand the meme’ish aspect, as I kind of went that route.

I want to iterate that this DD was written by me and ONLY posted here. I do not have any intention to post on reddit/twitter etc.

But yes, I do want to reiterate, your points:

  • This was heavily in reddit/WSB sights and pumped
  • Price movements were very very very volatile.
  • But prior to the ‘meme’ status, they core business was very much utilized in the trucking industry
    • with push towards clean energy, they have been signing mega deals to provide natural Gas to city transportations, signed a massive deal with UPS and today’s announcement. For the executives to actually put a clause in their stock, to me is very very bullish.
  • Like stated by JB, price point entry is key here.

I can only provide the info that I feel is relevant but my conviction is my own based on the info that is outlayed here.

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Hope we see some green in this for you. I will watch it too.

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Yes, I completely agree with you. I def see this as a 2022 play also and maybe expecting a big catalyst during 4q earning report in January. Their port of LA deal was huge, and I’m thinking they are working/cooking on a bigger deal elsewhere. I’m doing some digging to see if something is happening.

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Read the DD, will be sitting out. Not against the technology or ideas. Some reasoning:

Price Action/Chart: No bueno. Short term set up is meh & long term consolidation hasn’t been kind. As pointed out in your DD a lot of the increase in price has been sudden but then it ends up mostly unsustainable.

Dead WSB Horse: This ticker was beat to death by WSB. The beatings will continue until morale improves. I’m not super in touch with the current WSB sentiment status of this ticker and I acknowledge its highly unpredictable. If it starts going full meme status again in a significant way I would reassess a short term play strictly around that wave of sentiment.

Pumping: None of those price increases have really stuck around. I don’t like that for a long term play it seems sketch. I could use that knowledge for alpha to ride runups or pumps while being aware its going to dump and take short term plays. Even on a short term play to ride a pump I would probably be looking for clear event catalysts as my motivation to enter as I don’t want to be exposed to holding the ticker for long.

CLNE is a cool company, I hope the business weathers the meme status well and continues to grow a strong business with larger partnerships. Until the WSB meme status is almost forgotten it unfortunately makes CLNE an unpredictable long term investment AND too unpredictable of a short term trading instrument for me.

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@kickiniteasy I completely understand your logic and input.

Forgot to ping this new release here:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/clean-energy-host-rng-strategy-110000997.html

This is around the same time in January 2021 where they released some big news.