Stocks in focus: Hawaiian Airlines, Virgin Galactic, Taiwan Semiconductor, Ford

Yahoo Finance's Adam Shapiro and Emily McCormick highlight four stocks to watch: Hawaiian Airlines, Virgin Galactic, Taiwan Semiconductor, and Ford.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right, it is time for the 2&2, two stocks that Emily is watching, two stocks that I'm watching. And let's starts right now. Let's go back to the airlines because we were just talking about Delta, but the other airlines are trading higher today. And you can see United, American, JetBlue, Southwest. Also want to draw your attention to Hawaiian. Hawaiian Airlines not as large as those other carriers, but a big play for Hawaiian, especially as parts of Asia may begin to open up for international travel.

And so Cowen put out a report today, in which they upgraded Hawaiian to market perform, saying they're raising the rating on Hawaiian to reflect their view that long haul domestic capacity is likely to leave the islands and move to international markets. We believe as we get deeper into 2022, it's likely borders will reopen, and pent-up international demand will return. Look, we've had the CEO from Hawaiian on with us before. And he talked about the need for the Japanese traveler to return. Looks like that is in the works.

Now take a look at Virgin Galactic. Shares of space-- oh, boy, what goes up must come down. And this one is coming back to Earth in a big way. It is off 18% today. It is down. Just so you know, the stock is off something like 75%, 76% over the last six months.

Why is it falling to Earth today, you may ask? Well, I will tell you. They're going to offer up to about $500 million in a new debt offering. Investors don't like that. They don't want dilution of the equity, even though this is a bond offering company trying to raise money, so that they can go forward and advance, quote, "the development of their spacecraft fleet for high volume commercial service." Uh-huh. Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Adam, I'm watching shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Now the company is a major supplier to Apple, and those shares are up and hit a record intraday high today after TSMC raised its guidance earlier this morning. Now it also said that it expects to spend a record sum on chip production this year to meet elevated demand and help alleviate some of those chip shortages that we've been talking about recently.

Now TSMC said it will spend as much as $44 billion in CapEx to build out capacity this year. And in terms of guidance, TSMC now sees fiscal first quarter sales coming in at as much as $17.2 billion. That's well above consensus estimates. First quarter gross profit margin is expected to be between 53% and 55%, or higher than the fourth quarter's 52.7%. And analysts at the Wall Street firm Cowen also said the company's long-term forecast for gross margins, quote, "reflects favorably-- structurally favorable pricing and the value provided by TSMC." Now shares, as you can see, of that stock are up about 6% in intraday trading in New York.

Now I'm also watching shares of Ford. Now Ford stock has been on a tear recently. It's up more than 70% over the past six months. And today, shares hit their highest intraday level since 2001. Now that also brought the stock's market capitalization above $100 billion for the first time ever to top the valuation of General Motors, as well as the newly public electric vehicle maker, Rivian.

Now the reason for this is really because of Ford's own electric vehicle ambitions and signals that demand for Ford's EVs have remained high. Now just earlier this month, Ford said that it was doubling its planned production for its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck, and that it's also increasing production at Ford's battery-powered Mustang Mach-E. Now CEO Jim Farley has said Ford will build 600,000 EVs per year by 2024, with more to come thereafter. So definitely another stock to keep an eye on.