thethoughtcrossedmymind

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    • Mon Nov 10th 09:31 AM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Wholesale Electricity Prices Fall by 51 to 77%
      Electricity demand is seasonal. Look at year-over-year, not moving averages, whether 10-day, 30-day, or otherwise. Clearly demand may fall due to shrinking industrial output and pinched residential consumers. The bigger question for investors is the extent of the fall, which your moving averages overstate; just look at the late-Fall of 2006 to see that demand is still seasonally normal.
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    • Wed Sep 17th 18:16 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      Today's True Safe Haven Investments
      The only saving grace of clicking unwittingly on an article by this author is to see how his tone has evolved. After posting nonsense for a year or so he can now refer confidently to "past articles"; with luck, one of his scattered and conflicting guesses will provide fodder in a future article, as it did apparently with JRCC. But always his disregard for context and relevance betray either ignorance or desperation. See, for example, abundant above-ground gold, the tellurium alarmist echo chamber, and this logical gem: "A loose diamond cannot be worn. It must be set in a precious metal setting, such as platinum and palladium." (It would be just as compelling to tell palladium producers to invest in human cloning, so that the world would have more ring-fingers.)

      I don't comment often. I don't know why your writing aggravates me so. Other authors are just as awful, but not so consistently and from so many angles. Please keep your writing to yourself, or at least allow the titles of your articles to be as narrow as your views; I could then know to stay away.
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    • Wed Nov 21st 17:16 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      First Solar Vulnerable to a Tellurium Shortage?
      Contextually, "[t]he kind of material cost increases discussed previously" means increases in the cost of tellurium, not (as your editorial brackets would indicate, 20-fold increases in the cost of tellurium).

      On your second point, I remain unconvinced that the silicon shortage will ease significantly in the next few years, and therefore contend that it's a heckuva lot more ambitious to expect higher silicon costs than it is to predict that FSLR's business is doomed, which, let us not forget, is the extreme position which the OP has taken, and probably, based on his position, took that opinion first before looking for evidence to support it.
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    • Wed Nov 21st 16:38 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      First Solar Vulnerable to a Tellurium Shortage?
      Indeed, the Berkeley study states that costs and competition will constrain FSLR's growth -- just as they do the growth of every company! In spite of the author's doomsday tone, I fail to see why tellurium is such a special case. If one is inclined towards believing in peak oil, in part because we've explored the most fertile fields, then one can readily find evidence to support one's case. But catastrophic tellurium scarcity is woefully undocumented, perhaps because, until now, nobody has given a d*mn to document it.

      You say that it "is not too hard to imagine" skyrocketing tellurium prices. But on the flip side, it's not too hard to imagine plummeting prices as well. Human beings can imagine all kinds of scenarios. Smart investors, however, look for fact and coherent logic in order to harness their imagination. I haven't found either in the arguments of Mark Anthony (or of his alleged aliases).
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    • Mon Nov 19th 15:41 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      First Solar Vulnerable to a Tellurium Shortage?
      "So no one can pick up on the due diligence I have done." Indeed, reading your article I was unable to pick UP on any due diligence, but I'll gladly pick APART your sorry substitute.

      A necessary step in your proposed reasoning is just how high the price of tellurium has to go -- how extreme the "expected" rush needs to be -- before it could dent First Solar's growth, let alone put the company out of business. Tellurium, a key part of FSLR's production, is nonetheless a tiny input.

      According to a paper by U-C Berkeley researchers (lo and behold, you're not the only member of the "earth populace" to look at solar companies through the lens of materials scarcity), tellurium would have to shoot up another 20-fold before destroying FSLR's current cost advantage over competitors -- and that's even assuming, ambitiously, that competitors' costs don't also rise. socrates.berkeley.edu/...

      To illustrate, inversely, if the worth of your writing as investment guidance were rise to 20-fold, only then might it be competitive with, say, laying out pages of the WSJ in the local dog park.
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    • Mon Nov 19th 15:41 PM | Rating: 0 0
      Commented on:
      First Solar Vulnerable to a Tellurium Shortage?
      "So no one can pick up on the due diligence I have done." Indeed, reading your article I was unable to pick UP on any due diligence, but I'll gladly pick APART your sorry substitute.

      A necessary step in your proposed reasoning is just how high the price of tellurium has to go -- how extreme the "expected" rush needs to be -- before it could dent First Solar's growth, let alone put the company out of business. Tellurium, a key part of FSLR's production, is nonetheless a tiny input.

      According to a paper by U-C Berkeley researchers (lo and behold, you're not the only member of the "earth populace" to look at solar companies through the lens of materials scarcity), tellurium would have to shoot up another 20-fold before destroying FSLR's current cost advantage over competitors -- and that's even assuming, ambitiously, that competitors' costs don't also rise. socrates.berkeley.edu/...

      To illustrate, inversely, if the worth of your writing as investment guidance were rise to 20-fold, only then might it be competitive with, say, laying out pages of the WSJ in the local dog park.
      View article »
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