Paying $10.50 For a Ford 150.

Ford Motor Company may struggle to tell a solid story in the deteriorating automotive sector. But that doesn't mean you can't get all Costco and seek out some value in this ticker.

Whoever takes the physical price of a stupid share of stock seriously probably shouldn't be in the business of picking stocks. Because, as any real investor knows, the quoted price of said stock, in this age of fractionalized digital trading markets, is a Pirates of the Caribbean sort of experience.

The price quoted is more of a guideline than an actual thing.

Still, some stocks prices tell interesting stories. Over the past few month, the Big Board ticker "(F)" that is for Ford, has been whispering a come-back story, Right around April, it bottomed out at about $10.50. And since, it has been steadily gaining ground, posting something 15 percent gain into the summer. See the chart below.

Sure, Ford is not Tesla. But it's also not $333 a share, and it does not lose $2 billion a year.

What then does an investor get for her $10.50 a share? First, the alliterative fun of the numeric relationship between the Ford 150 pickup and $10.50! We love numbers. That's kind of fun. Second, that price tells an oddly relaxing story in the grinding, race-to-bottom digital reboot of the auto industry that is at hand. Need evidence that institutional investors are interested in gas-powered vehicles again? Beleagured Greenlight Capital's biggest long position these days is, you guessed it, General Motors (GM).

Built Not-So-Ford Tough. 

It's no secret that tough times are ahead for Ford. No matter what happens with self-driving, network-enabled automotive wizardry, the world is finally realizing that there are simply too many car companies. And Ford is struggling to remind the world that it can tell a more meaningful story than Uber and Lyft. Ford is facing the sad fact that automotive travel is about to be more efficient. There will be less cars in our driveways. Fewer places needed to park. And fewer need for cars in general. In fact Ford has committed itself to an SUV- and truck-only strategy. It wont make many passenger cars past 2020.

Ford's Focus, Fusions and Tauruses will just be more models Jerry Seinfeld keeps on hand to pick comedians and go for a drive and a cup of coffee. It's all about the SUV.

So you would think, that Ford would be the classic short play: Digging up some sort of long option pattern that slowly but surely pays off big as the this company slides into its final go-vertical tank phase. And than its time for the vultures. And the sale to, we guess, a foreign maker like Renault.

The birds are absolutely circling above Ford, in this godforsaken country now.

But Still Worth the Money. 

Of course, none of that will matter to the serious investor. Why? Because even though Ford struggles to tell a meaningful Information Age story, that grim financial narrative will not infect "(F)" the stock, at least if stays around $10. Because no matter what happens to Ford the company, there will always be "(F)" the stock. A stock that is traded on a legitimate stock exchange. A stock that pays a legitimate dividend of about 5 cents on every dollar. And a stock that a blind robot will always deem worth of its automated equities attentions.

Just take a look at this correlation matrix between Ford and the S&P 500. See the story? For all the drama of driverless cars and what is a next-gen car maker like Tesla worth anyway, the S&P 500 and Ford seem to move right along together, like old white people watching Turner Classic Movies.

And remember, behold how cheap all that exposure to equities is! One dollar of Ford's net earnings costs just $5.50 per share. Tesla can't even report earnings per share. It doesn't have them. And probably never will. "F" is a F-150 pick up of pure value.

Plus you get to pretend you own a share of the Ford Focus RS, which for less than $40,000 gets you as serious a practical performance driving experience as any car on the road. Seriously, it does.

So by all means, just imagine you're climbing into an F-150 Raptor, that's the really cool pick up with the boss 500 HP, supercharged engine that offers reasonable mileage. But instead of heading down to Costco for boxes of paper towels and soap, you will take yours to load up on as much "(F)" the stock as a reasonable percentage of your portfolio can manage.

Because in a world this flat dumb and automated, nobody can get effed by Ford.