Why Is Ford’s Stock Price Down 6% In Five Years?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 11, 9:35AM EDT

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Ford (F) stock is down 6% over five years as the S&P 500 gained 71%, despite a 20% surge this past month.
Ford abandoned its costly EV push and launched Ford Energy, producing LFP batteries for stationary storage grids through a CATL partnership.
Ford's long-term value hinges on domestic F-Series truck dominance, and investors remain unconvinced Ford Energy signals a broader pattern of smart decisions.
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Why Is Ford’s Stock Price Down 6% In Five Years? — © 2025 Ford Explorer Active (facelift), front 12.20.24 (BY-SA 4.0) by Kevauto

Ford (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) has done everything right recently. It abandoned its expensive EV plans, which will save billions of dollars a year. It has launched “Ford Energy,” which Wall St. loves. This operation manufactures lithium-ion phosphate (LFP) batteries for stationary energy storage. The plan is based in part on a partnership with China’s CATL. Ford Energy can power customers as large as energy grids. The news has driven Ford’s stock up over 20% in the last month.

A five-year look-back shows that Ford’s prospects remain poor in the minds of many investors. Ford’s stock is down 6% in the past five years, while the S&P 500 is up 71%. Ford’s stock was unusually high in early 2022, so the comparison with the current price will likely worsen soon. The comparison at that point is terrible; if Ford’s stock remains where it is, the dip from that time period will be closer to 20%.

The late 2021 and early 2022 stock price jump may have been caused by several factors. It exited Brazil, where it had done poorly. Ford was moving away from legacy models that had lost money. Despite this phase-out, Q3 2021 sales had been unexpectedly strong. Inflation, among other things, pushed the stock price down later in 2022. That erased the early 2022 stock price gains.

Ford’s stock did not exactly trade sideways from mid 2022 until early this year, but the trend was close to that. Increases and drops in overall sales moved it up and down over the period. So did Ford’s massive commitment to EVs and its exit from the sector.

Since Ford began shuttering its EV efforts, its management has begun to admit that Chinese EVs are the best in the world and might enter the US and severely cripple its sales.

What Ford’s price comes down to is that, at the end of the day, it is a legacy car company with sales dominated by the F-Series full-sized gas-powered pick-ups. These have been the best-selling vehicles in the US in decades. And, today, Ford is largely a domestic car company with very modest sales in overseas markets.

Ford Energy was a brilliant decision. Based on the stock price over a five-year period, investors do not anticipate another.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.