danno

Battery Investing for Beginners, Part 3

Why wouldn't your peer group include the following stocks?

Saft - among the best there is.
Polypore
Wilson Greatbatch
BYD
Chloride

Next: most of the companies that you selected are cheap because they are mediocre to lousy companies. That is not to say that there arent' frothy valuations for A123 and many of the Chinese small cap battery companies, but the valuations of the some of the companies that you think look cheap, may indeed by overly generous, to say the least. Certainly Enersys is a great company, but the rest of your picks get grades of 'C' through 'F' in terms of quality stocks.

Smart DOE Battery Manufacturing Grants and Dilution for Dummies

Saft is probably a better company than any of these, but is Ultralife for real? My understanding is that the only reason Ultralife exists is that the DoD wanted a domestic battery supplier and that ULBI products are a) nothing special, and some are b) made by 3rd parties for it. Not exactly a good place to be given the need for technology breakthroughs.

Chloride as a major provider of UPS batteries which is an interesting market niche and BYD which makes commodity lithium batteries and is hell-bent on the low-cost producer strategy.

About Exide: Does anyone know if XIDE has been able to keep any good employees/ or does any significant R&D since its scandals and massive environmental liabilities?

Finally, what about Polypore? It makes components. Are its products anything special?

Index Watch: 6 New Clean-Tech Stocks to Join CELS

Yawn. CELS is such a bozo index, if one really looks at this index and what has done in the past, then one realizes it's totally worth ignoring. This is an index that loaded up on grain ethanol stocks at one point, added stocks that announced that they were delisting, or even had only 2% of its business in renewable energy (thank you Eurotrust). When you look at the quality of the stocks in CELS (e.g., CPST, FCEL, AVR) it's quite apparent that the these guys not only don't know what they're doing but the future returns will stink as bad as past returns. Note to author: engage brain before writing.