Redwood_1

Short Interest on Nasdaq: Why the Data Delay?

I think all the questions you raise are perfectly valid. It is easy to assume, even if you're not a conspiracy theorist, that powerful hedge funds with connections inside the regulatory bodies that are supposed to keep the playing field level, have access to all manner of information that the average investor will never have. All you have to do is track the career paths of your average mid-level SEC employer and you can see why this is happening. Anybody so quick to cast aspersions on those who would ask these questions very likely has their own agenda, probably at the receiving end of the benefits of the very issues you raise.

Barron's Is Wrong: Solar Offers Good Value

ENER makes panels? I did not know that. I thought they made a Building Integrated PV that could be rolled out over the roof, taking the place of conventional roofing material, thus offering a host of other cost advantages over conventional crystaline PV. They must have given that up so that they could offer instead a product that makes it easier for idiot analysts to plug them into the same box as all the other PV producers.

Smart Grid's Enabler - Alternative Energy Storage

I'd like to see how you're coming up with the assumption that compressed air is in any way an efficient storage mechanism. From a mechanical standpoint, it's an incredibly lossy process, and one subject to pretty extreme maintenance requirements to boot. Pumped hydro storage is only nominally better when you consider the environmental costs of diverting and storing the water, but at least it isn't converting so many kilowatt hours into noise, which is where most compressor energy ends up.

The Global War Against Shorts: Canada Bans Short-Selling

The answer to your question, which is based on a false premise, seems obvious to me.

The problem never was short selling or those who engage in it. The problem is NAKED short selling and those who not only engage in it but use it aggressively to manipulate markets, further compounded by the fact that even though it has been illegal all along, it has been allowed to happen completely unfettered for so long that the agencies who should be enforcing rules prohibiting it are now powerless to reign it in.

Consequently, the only way to get a handle on it quickly, which was absolutely necessary in order to defuse a situation that would have inevitably led to market meltdown, was to temporarily halt all short selling altogether.

It's far from a perfect solution, but one that has had the desired affect, at least temporarily. It is now encumbent upon the SEC to get ahead of the problem of NAKED short selling, get all the outstanding Failures To Deliver satisfied, and then move forward with a market where orderly short selling is reintroduced in such a fashion that powerful hedge funds can no longer get away with selling what they don't possess nor have any intention of possessing.

The free marketeers who bitch about this action now should have been speaking up over the last several years while the NAKED short problem spun out of control. Since they didn't, they can all STFU now as far as I'm concerned.

Five Retailers for Falling Gas Prices

"This should provide huge relief to consumers and allow for more spending at stores and restaurants. "

I want to have way more faith in our population than that. Runaway debt is what's gotten us into the mess we're in, but people are starting to realize that and consequently the savings rate, which has over the last decade gone negative for the first time ever, more recently has risen from 0.3% to 2.6%.

If Americans respond to a 30 cent drop in the price of gas by immediately running to the mall, we're in even worse shape than I thought.

Too Late to the Oil Party? Consider the Alternative

That was my comment about oil linked to transportation but not electric power. The following comment about heating oil is well taken, but still, that's heating, not electric power. Very little heating in the US is from electric power. Fan energy is not insignificant, but electric resisitance heating has been phased out to the point where it is negligible. The analysis in this article doesn't really go into solar thermal, which would compete with heating oil. What's needed is to simplify the analysis and make sure we're comparing apples to apples, and make sure we understand when oranges appear in the bushel.

Too Late to the Oil Party? Consider the Alternative

I'm an alternative energy bull, but I believe it is an incorrect assumption that oil and alternative energy are necessarily linked in any substantive way.

The vast majority of alternative energy stocks have more to do with electric power than transportation. Oil is and always has been about transportation. Our standard power sources are coal, natural gas, and nuclear, with gas taking up a greater and greater share. Less than 3% of power production is from oil, most of that is peaking or backup generation, and even that is in decline.

This doesn't discount your analysis as a component of a trading strategy, but as a long term investment strategy it's important to understand that oil is not in fact directly linked in any way to solar, wind, or other distributed generation that make up what we think of as alternative energy.

(The obvious exception of course is any AE that deals with, influences, or is influenced by transportation, such as batteries or electric vehicles, and of course companies like Energy Conversion Devices do have a dog in that race, but still, it's a small factor relative to the electric power part of the equation).