Andrew Ling

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Eck, I've been trying to find a way to ship my Elise to Europe for the 3 months I'll be spending there. When I was there last year I drove my 60 horsepower rental Nissan Micra on the Autobahn flooring it for hours at a time. Unfortunately few people know the details and I didn't want to spend my vacation dealing with foreign bureaucrats. They charge a 20% tax to import the car but I figured I could sell it there to recover it there due to the favorable exchange rate and buy a new one when I got back.

I also got in and out of SOLF for a small profit last year before it had a huge collapse. I decided only to trade stocks I don't mind holding for long periods of time from now on. I'm still practicing my trading as it only accounts for about 5% of my position even though I make about 20 trades a month. My main trading principle is the change in the change in stock price. In other words when a stock accelerates on the way up it's commonly referred to as a break out and a buy indicator. Similarly when a stock sells off but the pace of the selloff slows to a stop it's also a buy indicator. This has been a great day trade with FSLR whenever the stock opens down on low volume. It will usually decrease it's downwards slope and then reverse itself at midday rallying back close to the open price by close. This doesn't work on high volume trading days since any resistance and support levels can be easily broken on volume.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Tommy C, carbon fiber is indeed light but the cheapest car made out of carbon fiber is actually the electric Tesla Roadster at $100K. It's a long way off from mass market appeal. Automakers will have to walk before they can run. They are still using mostly steel in their chassis which should be replaced with Aluminum. My Lotus Elise does 0-60 in 4.8 secs and gets 30 MPG thanks to it's 150 pound aluminum chassis and lightweight plastic body panels. I'm still amazed that Porche and other sports car makers still make their chassis out of steel.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Slider the difference between the 70s and now was that the 70s was an artificial opec shortage and the peak was in US production. Current prices have nothing to do with opec. They are due to a peak in world production. Unless you plan on discovering life and hence oil on Mars peaking in world production is a problem several orders of magnitudes greater than peaking US production. There is no real solution within 20 years although anything that helps compensate for energy shortfalls will benefit.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

sirfisup, when I drive to the Akeena Solar I can see obvious differences between the modules offered by different manufacturers. When I was in Europe I saw no differences between the GE, Vestas, or any other wind turbine. The only way to cut costs in wind is to make them even bigger, and 1MW turbines are already huge. It's a similar story with solar thermal. Although wind and solar thermal are about half the price per kwh of PV currently, they are mechanically based technologies that have existed for centuries with very little innovation occuring. This is why 2030 forecasts have PV accounting for the lions share of new electricity generation as well as a large chunk of total capacity.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

I try to stay away from small caps under $500 mil or so. Over the years I've seen numerous promise the moon and fail to deliver. I'm beginning to suspect some of these managements may not even believe they can achieve the targets they set. Many are just pumping their stocks. A revolutionary technology needs to be combined with credible management. That's why Tesla Motors is my most anticipated IPO. Although they're also missing production goals, their CEO Elon Musk is proven as the billionaire founder of paypal.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

I've owned STP in the past as my "value" play simply because I've been uncomfortable at times having all my holdings in FSLR. However, AMAT is my new limited downside play and I see no reason to buy STP over AMAT. With 2 billion in annual income AMAT is the real potential economy of scale. The $1.9 Billion Best Solar order alone would leapfrog best solar over STP. The slew of low priced pv coming online is very bad news for any company still trying to expand economies of scale with a potentially inferior technology. STP realizes this and is also a customer of AMAT. When you think about AMAT's potential it's comparable to all the other solar stocks combined. Since they're turning over equipment quickly they don't have to raise as much money as STP or Best Solar.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

GE is currently lacking an LED presence. That's what led to rumors they may make an offer for Cree. I wouldn't worry about GE. The same thing could've been said about all these solar "startups" 10 years ago. But GE has been unbelievably slow to the solar game. Competition is always fierce in the early stages of hypergrowth but generally all the stocks involved appreciate for at least a few years until the market sorts out the winners from the losers.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Wind farms are great but the problem with wind power stocks is that it's a commoditized business. I used to own Zoltek (ZOLT) as a wind power play since they have a large share of the carbon fiber market, but the company is obviously mismanaged. Notice how I left all the Chinese solar stocks off the list. All of the companies I focus on have disruptive technology.

Solar Power Will Be Transformational in the Next Decade

Supershort you're missing the point completely. A major reason the economy is in such bad shape is due to rising energy prices which benefits solar stocks. Would you also short agricultural stocks, energy, and mining due to the economic downturn?

Solar Power Will Be Transformational in the Next Decade

Also, consider the adoption of past comparable technologies. In order to displace an old technology it's not enough for the new technology to be equal. It has to be far superior. I've always been an early adopter, one of the first 1% to switch to a new technology e.g. dialup modem to broadband, film to digital cameras, cds to dvds to blu-ray. But there is a major lag between when a product seems clearly superior to me and other early adopters and when the general public finally switch over.

A good example of this is the number of HDTVs that were still flying off the shelves last year that were NOT 1080p capable. By the year the prices for 720/1080i and 1080p were already comparable. People just weren't aware what 1080p was.

Another is when Intel introduced the Core Duo. Everyone that reads benchmarking sites knew this was the end for AMD. After a decade of having a superior product but being barely able to compete with Intel they now had an inferior product and nothing in the pipeline. The market is still discovering this as proven by the fact the entire market sold off when AMD missed but then rallied when Intel beat. This was to be expected.

Solar Power Will Be Transformational in the Next Decade

Jack, using solar water heaters as a example, just because a technology is economical doesn't mean it will catch on quickly. Solar water heaters are such a great value and have been for decades. But relatively few in the States have one. Then again, the Toyota Corolla is probably the most economical car on the market but again
it's not even the best selling car in the country.

Most of us agree that solar will take the lion's share of new energy generation 30 years from now due to economics, but how much share it has in 5 years will depend highly on the whims of people and governments.