What happened

Developing new, solid-state battery technology for the electric-vehicle industry isn't easy, but QuantumScape (QS 2.13%) continues to make progress. The company updated investors with its first-quarter results in the last week of April. While it continued to show steady progress, QuantumScape stock extended its April slide throughout May as well. QuantumScape shares lost another 14.4% during the month, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

So what

QuantumScape is still a $5 billion company, even after losing about 47% in value year to date. With the Nasdaq Composite at bear market levels, it's not surprising to see a pre-revenue technology company down twice as much this year as the tech-heavy index. Much of its value is based solely on potential and relative progress, and investors aren't willing to hold the riskiest investments through the down cycle. QuantumScape shares have been falling as a result. But that can provide a more attractive entry point for those who still want to add to the speculative portion of a portfolio. 

Now what

As the market has dropped, business leaders including JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon and Tesla's Elon Musk have warned of a potentially severe economic downturn or recession to come. If that's the case, investors are probably thinking that money invested in a speculative stock like QuantumScape will be dead money for some time to come. 

That's particularly true when the timeline for potential commercialization is still at least more than a year away. QuantumScape provided guidance to investors in April, noting it only hopes to begin producing samples on a pre-pilot production line in 2023. The technology still needs to be proven, but the company has been making progress on that front.

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Most of the bold face type above had the bold face added by me so as to indicate those passages that I interpreted as being similar to the situation for POET Technologies.  As I read in that SA article about the dilemma for QuantumScape, I could not help but substitute the name POET Technologies in most of those phrases in my mind.  Obviously the two companies are in different areas of technology and are vastly different companies in size and, particularly, in recognition by the giants of the investment community, but much of the reasons for the recent share price decline for QuantumScape sounded so similar to the palavar repeated on this message board and elsewhere in relation to the decline recently for the stock price in POET.