Portfolio

This morning I purchased shares in Hoku Scientific, Inc. (HOKU) for my personal portfolio and an average price of $9.47. I was unable to purchase shares in this stock for the mutual fund since it is a recent IPO that came to the market in early August. Hoku is a fuel cell membrane manufacture that is based out of Hawaii. They have strategic partnerships created with Sanyo Electric and Nissan. This company also has the honor of being one of the select few companies in this sector that is actually profitable. Another amazing aspect of this company is...

Tom Konrad CFA  My Ten Clean Energy Stocks for 2015 model portfolio added a second month to its winning streak, with a 6.1% gain for the month and a 5.7% gain for the year, despite a continued drag by the strong dollar.  If measured in terms of the companies' local currencies, the portfolio would have been up 7.5% for the month and 10.5% for the quarter or year to date.  For comparison, the broad universe of US small cap stocks rose 1.5%  for the month and 4.0% for quarter, as measured...

Calpine Corp. (CPN) shares are down another 20% again today and are now down in the 20-30 cent range. They were given notice today by a Delaware judge that they have until January 22 to repay $313 million owed to bondholders. Moody's has also downgraded their corporate bonds to junk bond Ca stauts (10 levels below investment grade.) Calpine was kicked out of the S&P 500 recently and now they are looking like they will declare bankruptcy. Boy the hits just keep on coming.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on the upcoming Clean Power Call in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC). In a nutshell, the Clean Power Call consists of an auction conducted by the government-owned integrated power company to award long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) to private wind developers. This is the model that has dominated in Canadian wind power so far. The notable thing about this model is that the PPA facilitates access to financing significantly for successful bidders, since the counterparty is a proxy of a credit-worthy government. EarthFirst Canada (EF) (ERFTF.PK or EF.TO)...

Yesterday, I outlined a strategy to approximately replicate the performance of a Clean Energy mutual fund at much lower cost, with only a couple hours of effort.  I gave a cost example based on $5000 invested in 5 stocks, with another $1000 worth of a single stock added in each subsequent year.   This is the procedure I would use to select the initial five stocks. Collect all the top five or ten holdings of the available Clean Energy mutual funds.  This data is available from Morningstar, and on fund sponsor's home pages. A few of these holdings may...

Tom Konrad CFA The first half of 2015 saw a mild advance in the broad market, but concerns about rising interest rates and the ongoing Greek debt drama sent income stocks, clean energy, and most non-US currencies down decisively.  My Ten Clean Energy Stocks for 2015 model portfolio has heavy exposure to not only clean energy, but income stocks (6 out of 10) and foreign stocks (4 out of 10.)  Despite this the stormy market for all three, the portfolio delivered admirably. The model portfolio ended the second quarter up 9.7%, compared to its broad market...

Tom Konrad CFA My ten annual stock picks have outperformed their clean energy benchmark for the third year running. Each year, I publish a list of ten renewable energy, energy efficiency, and cleantech stocks that I feel will outperform their peers in the coming year.  In both 2008 and 2009, my picks have beaten their industry benchmark, the PowerShares Wilderhill Clean Energy ETF (PBW), the most widely held industry ETF and the one that I recommend for making short-term bets on the clean energy industry.  The 2010 list is here. This year has been an interesting...

Index to the Clean Energy Shopping List Series, and a few Bonus Stocks. Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA I started my "Clean Energy Shopping List" series on the premise that the market was near a peak, and it would be better to wait than to buy now.  My market call turned out to be premature (or just plain wrong... time will tell) and the market has since advanced more than I thought it would.  But I feel the challenges facing our economy and financial system are too grave not to bring down the market from its current heights eventually, so...

DayStar Technologies Inc (DSTI) has been on my radar for some time and the recent operational update created some renewed interest in the company. The stock traded up nicely over the past couple of days and it is now trading back down to the near term support due to some profit taking on the news. I have been looking for a good entry point on this stock and I feel like today is the day to make the move. Technically, the downside of this stock is that it may not be able to hold its currently levels and could...

Tom Konrad CFA Performance in May Fear of the disintegration of the Euro resurfaced in May, sending all stocks downward.  Clean energy stocks once again fell more than the market as a whole.  Possible causes are that many clean energy sectors are exposed to further loss of European subsidies, and that clean energy stocks tend to be more volatile than the market as a whole, with both up and down moves being magnified.  The Russell 2000 index (which I use as a broad market benchmark in this series) was down 7.1% in May, the Powershares Wilderhill Clean...

Tom Konrad CFA Year In Review For the fourth year in a row, my model portfolio of clean energy stocks has beaten the clean energy sector as a whole, this year by 23.8%.   Unfortunately, this was mostly due to another year of poor performance by my industry benchmark, the widely held Powershares Clean Energy (PBW) ETF, which lost 16.4% for the year.  My model portfolio, composed of eleven clean energy stocks listed in this article published on January 2nd, gained 7.4%, still short of the performance of the broad market, which gained 16.6%.  The general market...

I took 2 long positions yesterday (1 in my normal trading account and the other in my retirement account) in an emerging Canadian integrator of megawatt-sized wind energy conversion systems (i.e turbines) called AAER Inc . Besides turbine assembly, the company also provides a range of services to clients in the wind industry, ranging from assistance in project planning and financing to post-installation maintenance. Now it must be said from the outset that is a very speculative play on North American wind and not suitable for all investors. I entered one of my positions at C$0.38 and the...

Update: an expanded version of this portfolio appears here. Alternative Energy: Risky but Alluring For many of my older or more cautious clients, investment in small, profitless (or nearly so) startup alternative energy companies is inappropriate.  Even a diversified ETF such as the Powershares Wilderhill Clean Energy portfolio (AMEX: PBW) is too volatile due to its heavy exposure to profitless renewable energy companies such as Evergreen Solar (ESLR) (NasdaqGM: ESLR).   Because of this, in the last year PBW has been over $24, but as low as $16.24.  While such volatility can lead to supercharged profits when you are...

A year ago, I brought you  10 Alternative Energy Stocks I thought were worth speculating on for 2008. I revisited these in June, when a balanced portfolio of the 10 was "up 11.4% for the year, compared to the S&P 500 which is down 4.2% and the NASDAQ Clean Edge US Index, which is down approximately 14.3%."   Speculative picks tend to do better than the market as a whole in bull markets, and worse in bear markets, so given the steep drop in markets since then, I would normally expect these more speculative picks to fare worse.  This is...