An Investor’s Reaction to a Trump Victory
See my response here: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/how-one-clean-energy-investor-is-reacting-to-a-trump-victory Tom Konrad
Free Talk: A Permaculture Portfolio
For readers in the Hudson Valley, I will be giving a free talk next Monday night. I will speak about applying permaculture design principles to your investment strategy. While I developed my own strategy over the last two decades without any reference to these design principles, now that I'm familiar with them, I realize that I have been thinking along these lines for a long time. The design principles are remarkably robust and intuitive.
I used to think Permaculture was just about redesigning our food systems, but it's much much more than that.
The talk is sponsored by the Rondout Valley...
Green Energy Investing for Experts, Index and Wrap-Up
Tom Konrad, CFA My Green Energy Investing for Experts series looked at ways shorting could both protect your portfolio against market decline, and make it greener by shorting decidedly non-green companies. This is an index of the entries, plus one more industry for you to consider. Green Energy Investing for Experts, Part I made the case that shorting stocks that are particularly vulnerable to peak oil or climate change is a good way to hedge a portfolio of green stocks against a market decline while making the whole portfolio greener. Green Energy Investing for Experts, Part II looked at...
Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
Information asymmetry, climate investing and the active management edge.
By Garvin Jabusch
The theory of efficient markets says all stock prices are perpetually accurate, because investors always have complete and up-to-date information about their holdings.
But as any casual observer knows, information and topical awareness are not evenly distributed, even among professional analysts. Reality is always far more complicated than equity markets can quickly assimilate, meaning information asymmetry is a constant. While usually considered a type of market failure, information asymmetry is frequently used as a “source of competitive advantage.” The person with the most information is best equipped to make the best...
Short Demand for Cree High and Rising
I got a call from my broker this morning asking me if I'd be willing to loan out my shares of Cree, Inc. (NASD:CREE) to a short seller. Since the only cost to me is that I will not be able to vote my shares, and I will earn 2.5% per annum on the value, I said "yes." Normally, brokerages get the shares they lend out to shorts from margin accounts with a margin balance. Since I never carry a balance (although I do have a margin account in order to trade options) they must ask my permission...
An Elephant Hunter Explains Inflection Point Investing
John Petersen In "An Elephant Hunter Explains Market Dynamics" I discussed the two basic types of public companies; earnings-driven companies that are “bought” in top-tier weighing machine markets and event-driven companies that are “sold” in lower-tier voting machine markets. Today I'll get a bit more granular and show how "sold" companies usually fall into one of two discrete sub-classes that have a major impact on their stock market valuations. As a starting point, I'll ignore the China-based companies that are listed in the US because their quirky metrics would only confuse the analysis. Then I'll break...
Green Energy Investing For Beginners, Part IV: Model Portfolio
Tom Konrad, CFA My target sector allocation for Green Energy Sectors: How much to put in Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Biomass, Biofuels, Energy Efficiency, Alternative Transport, and enabling technologies such as Smart Grid and Transmission. In Part I of this series on green energy investing (see also Part II and Part III), I suggested readers "structure your portfolio to reflect the technologies which are actually going to make a difference." This is not the same as investing in a market portfolio, because the market tends to overemphasize the most exciting or familiar (as opposed to the most useful) technologies. This...
Will Climate Advocacy Pay for Shareholders?
On Monday, we learned about big coal companies pushing back against the major US corporations of the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP,) which advocates for mandatory regulation of greenhouse gas with their own lobbyists. Since I have advocated buying companies that take a proactive stance on climate change, I thought it might be instructive to compare the returns of the original ten members of US-CAP with the returns of the big coal coal companies (more companies have since joined,) over the six months since the Climate Action Partnership issued their Call for Action on Climate Change. The Payoff ...
My #1 Rule of Investing
Tom Konrad CFA Rules of Investing Warren Buffett says "The first rule of Investing is don't lose money; the second rule is don't forget rule #1." Jim Hansen at Ravenna Capital Management and publisher of the Master Resource Report about oil and other energy news has a "prime directive" (a la Star Trek) about oil prognostication which is "never predict prices." These rules have to be taken metaphorically, not literally. Buffett's rule is too general to be useful. I take his message to mean that care to avoid losses is more effective than...
The Short Side of Clean Energy
Green Energy Investing For Experts, Part I Tom Konrad, CFA You don't have to be long Renewable Energy stocks to have a green portfolio. Shorting, selling calls, or buying puts on companies and industries which are heavily dependent on dirty and finite fossil fuels not only makes a portfolio greener, it can protect against the effects of a permanent global decline caused by peak oil. Nate Hagens presented this slide at the 2009 International Peak Oil Conference: It shows his conception of the different schools of thought among those of us who understand peak oil. Those represented in...
Preparing for Catastrophe: Is your global warming portfolio ready for rising sea levels?
A Worse-Case Scenario I believe that a large part of global warming denial is fear: fear that if we acknowledge that global warming is happening, we will be morally obligated to do something about it, and that the problem is too large for us to do anything effective. I also believe that denying the problem is certain to render us all ineffective in dealing with it. But getting over our global warming denial is not the only obstacle in our way to dealing with it. Global warming is already happening, and future temperature rises are already inevitable given the...
Green Energy Investing For Beginners, Part III: Before You Invest
Tom Konrad, CFA Before you consider green stock market investments, invest in yourself. A reader of my article on asset allocation for green energy investors brought up an important point: we may have green opportunities in our own lives, such as improving the energy efficiency of our homes, which will return much safer and higher returns than green stocks, especially when the market as a whole is as overvalued as I currently believe it is. Homeowners typically have a large number of high-return energy efficiency investments they can make. Since energy efficiency reduces energy use, it both produces returns...
UltraPromises Fall Short
When I first came across ProShares' UltraShort ETFs, I thought they were a brilliant idea. They seem to promise a multitude of advantages for investors: The ability to hedge market or sector exposure without having to go short. (Going short requires a margin account, and US law prohibits the use of margin in most retirement accounts.) They should have a better risk profile than shorting. With an UltraShort, you can't lose more than your initial investment. With true shorting, the potential losses are unlimited. As the underlying index rises, each percentage gain creates a smaller dollar fall, while...
2023: Looking Up Like the 2009 Disney Movie
There is no shortage of things to worry about as we start 2023. The Federal Reserve is (rightly, in our opinion) worried about inflation becoming entrenched, and so is likely to continue hiking interest rates for much of 2023. Putin looks unlikely to concede defeat in Ukraine, and his desperation may lead to escalation, potentially even of the nuclear variety. California seems to be washing away while remaining in a drought.
China has loosened the zero-Covid policies that helped the country continue functioning during the first stage of the pandemic, while much of the rest of the world shut down. ...
Calling for a Marshall Plan, not a Manhattan Project
Electricity too cheap to meter. For many renewable energy advocates, that is the holy grail… new technology which will not only solve the problem of carbon emissions, but be so transformative that we no longer have to worry about turning off the lights when we leave the room. We could argue for days about the viability of any such technology, be it cold fusion, hydrogen, or photovoltaic nanodots. I personally have strong opinions about the likelihood of any technology to produce energy so cheaply that it would not make sense to use some mechanism...
How Weather Risk Transfer Can Help Wind & Solar Development
by Daryl Roberts
The Need To Accelerate Renewables Adoption
Renewables are growing rapidly as a percentage of new electric generation, but are still being assimilated too slowly and still constitute too small of a fraction of total generation, to be able to transition quickly enough to scale into a low carbon economy in time to mitigate climate change.
The issue of providing public support, with subsidies and other reallocation methods, is a politically charged subject. High carbon advocates, for example American Petroleum Institute, argues that support for renewables distorts the market. On the other hand, it has been argued, for example by...



