Yahoo Finance Live's Brad Smith, David Briggs, and Rachelle Akuffo review several of the day's trending stock tickers, including an uptick in Mullen Automotive's shares.

Video Transcript

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- Welcome back to "Yahoo Finance Live." It's time for our triple play, where Brad, Dave, and myself check out three tickers that we've been watching today. Now for me, the standout was Mullen Automotive. Now you may not have heard of them, but they're actually one of the few outliers doing well among all these other falling electric vehicle stocks.

Now we saw at one point, a lot of this came from this positive coverage today from its new crossover Mullen FIVE vehicle in this automotive publication called Car Buzz. So that really helped the stock rally. It was up 50% at one point. Now we're seeing that it's up still at around 40%. So still doing well for the day. But it's also still off of its 52-week high.

- Now this builds on the progress that they made last month, when they announced progress in their solid state battery technology, which drove interest in the stock. Now that's actually a significant improvement over the current lithium ion battery systems that are currently used in EVs. And now the company says it's Mullen FIVE is conceptually-- just conceptually-- competitive with the Tesla Model Y and the Ford Mach E. Now those are some very big shoes to fill in an already-crowded EV market. But at less than $2 a share, you know, if you're more risk-tolerant, this might be something you're interested in.

- And it's a super domestic play, right, too, with Mullen with much of the auto sales and the chain of car dealerships that they have primarily being in California and Arizona mostly. But then additionally, you start to get into some of the other EV ambitions, and we're going to kind of stay with that theme for my triple play play of the day.

But looking at this, as you mentioned, over the past year, it has been a steady decline for Mullen Automotive and a larger question mark as of, where will they see some type of fanfare if the continuation of EV plays, of EV investments that we see, especially among some of the larger auto manufacturers, where that continues to move forward and what type of cash positioning Mullen's going to continue to need to ultimately compete in that market, as well.

But since I said that we'll stick with kind of the EV play as of right now, let me take you to my pick of the day. It's Ford, mostly on a lot of the news that's come out around Ford. And you're seeing them on the day, down by about 2% here for shares of F. One of the big announcements that they made this morning, even more of the ambition from Ford to sell into Europe, as well.

They've got about 600,000 EVs that they're committing to sell annually by 2026. Seven new connected electric vehicles, as well. And then they're also bringing on even more capacity to produce those electric vehicles in Cologne, Germany. That's expected to be 1.2 million vehicles over six years, a total production investment of about $2 billion here. So, again, that is more of the money that's going to go out the door for a company like Ford at a time like this.

Investors perhaps pricing that in a little bit, as well as some of the headwinds and some of the downgrades that they've received most recently, as well. But I think as of right now, we've heard increasingly about Ford's ambitions, especially in the electric vehicle space, and we'll see how that shapes up.

- All right. Brad, hop in your Ford and stop by the Golden Arches. My play is McDonald's. Executives from McDonald's, as well as Coca-Cola, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and a couple other Western companies, have been threatened by Russian prosecutors. If they criticize the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they will be arrested, say the Russian prosecutors. And if those companies pull out of Russia, their assets will be seized by the Russian government.

McDonald's had an interesting run the last two years. Fell as low as $149 two years ago. Bounced back, year-to-date, to $220. Down about 1/2% to $226. Now Russia-- they closed 800 McDonald's stores across the country, prompting some to go online and try to sell anything from McDonald's wrappers to bags to a $36 Big Mac. Hasn't sold yet. They're normally about $1. 4 bucks here in the US. 6 bucks for a Big Mac combo.

And confession, guys, I have never, in my 45 years, tried a Big Mac. Am I alone on that?

- [LAUGHS]

- You-- you might be.

- Ever.

- Now granted--

- Can we put breaking up now?

- --it's been a very, very long time. It's been a very long time since I've had a Big Mac. But yeah, I don't know too many people who haven't at least tried it. But I know that I wouldn't pay $36 for it, no matter how badly I wanted it. Maybe the fries, but no, not not the burger.

It'll be interesting to see how Russia-- whether or not they draw up that legislation about taking some of the assets from some of these companies, because that really does open up an entire whirlwind. I believe they're holding onto about $10 billion of leased jets in the country, so I can only imagine what sort of domino effect that might have. Hopefully, they don't pull that trigger. But you know, this is war. You never know what might happen.

- Yeah. Really pushing the Big Mac index off the charts here with this one, Dave. $36-- I don't think we've ever seen a Big Mac sold for that much. And for no-- well, not on taste, at least. That's not the reason, for sure, we do know right now. So we'll continue to track that moving forward from here, as well.

- Clearly, I am-- I am not on the market for a $36, let alone a $1, Big Mac.