lance sjogren

The Best Safe-Haven Investments, and Some Potential Threats

By the way: My personal view is that fuel cells may not have much role in a renewable energy world.

If you pick up most recent books on alternative energy, you will find them analyze the "hydrogen economy" and conclude that it is inferior to other alternatives.

1). low energy efficiency from the production to consumption end of the process

2). hydrogen is a lousy energy carrier (extremely expensive to store and ship, and in my view that is liable to remain true in the future)

The Best Safe-Haven Investments, and Some Potential Threats

Forgot to mention. The reason for my interest in those metals is their application to alternative energy.

Most of you probably know why Lithium is of interest, Lithium batteries are by far the front-runner for use in electric vehicles.

Vanadium is of interest in the alternative energy world because of its use in "flow batteries", batteries whose fluids are stored in external tanks, thus potentially allowing the creation of batteries with very large energy storage capacity at lower cost than you could achieve doing the same thing with conventional batteries.

There are people who also believe Vanadium demand will go up a lot in its use in high-performance steel as developing economies like China switch to greater use of such high-end infrastructure products.

The Best Safe-Haven Investments, and Some Potential Threats

As to platinum and palladium, I would like to think he is right. I own some Stillwater. If you look at the amount of Palladium they have in the ground, including "mineralized material" (which I believe is the equivalent to what is called "resources" in the Canadian standards), their stock is at some ludicrously cheap valuation like $20 per ounce of Palladium or so.

However, that doesn't do you any good unless Palladium prices are high enough for mining it to be profitable. Since Stillwater was roughly breaking even, I believe, back when Palladium was in the 300's, I assume they should be able to make a good profit at current prices.

However, to me the big question mark is demand. In the near term, the developing world is building more cars, which should increase demand for Palladium. However, I would think within 5-10 years we will have viable all-electric vehicles, and then demand for PGM's could go down a good bit.

Another wild card, however, is to what extent the industry is able to get Palladium more popular as a metal for jewelry. That could open up a lot of additional demand.

But some metals I think are worth looking at investing in are Lithium and Vanadium. You can invest in North America's biggest Lithium deposit by buying Western Uranium, or Western Lithium, the latter of which was spun off by Western Uranium and started trading last week. Western Uranium still retains about a 30% interest in Western Lithium, so you can get exposure to Lithium by buying it as well. As to Vanadium, I learned of a stock a few days ago that seems to me the best way to invest in Vanadium, but it is tiny and illiquid and I am still buying so I won't mention it at this time.

The Best Safe-Haven Investments, and Some Potential Threats

1). Comparing the relative merits of gold and toilet paper as an investment should include the cost of warehousing the toilet paper. I don't think I have room in my apartment to put $100,000's of investment dollars worth of toilet paper.

2). Gold cannot be evaluated as another commodity. Gold is the most fundamental form of MONEY, a status it has gained from thousands of years of history.

Since gold is a form of money, its relative scarcity needs to be judged by comparing the quantity of gold to the quantity of paper and electronic currency.