Strategy

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...

Tom Konrad, CFA When I called the peak a year ago, it was too soon for the broad market, but not for clean energy stocks.  I think both have room to fall, but clean energy may bottom first.  Almost a year ago at the start of June, I wrote saying "we're near the peak" of the stock market.  I was too early, and admitted it in August.  But I also said that it was a bad time to be in the market: the risks of a decline far outweighed the potential gains of remaining in an...

Tom Konrad CFA Three green stock specialists see individual stocks at attractive values, but think it's too soon to call the bottom for the sector as a whole. Last month, I wrote that I'm again finding clean energy stocks that I think are bargains, and listed ten.  I was not ready to call a bottom for clean energy, and in fact said I expected the market to get worse before it gets better, so investors should keep some money on the sidelines to wait for more opportunities to emerge. In a little over a month...

by Tom Konrad Ph.D., CFA An enthusiastic solar volunteer recently asked me: “What can I invest in to prepare for the next financial crisis?” The situation made the question deeply ironic. The woman asking me was trying to help people invest in solar systems through Solarize, a nonprofit, community-sponsored group buying and discount program. Our town of Marbletown, New York and the neighboring towns of Rochester and Olive have just launched Solarize Rondout Valley, a campaign open to residential and commercial building owners in Ulster County. Solarize campaigns are designed to make it easier and cheaper...

This is a guest post by Brad Wright, who felt that my "Beginners" series was a too high level to really live up to the name.  He's probably right about that, so here is his effort to bring it down to basics for the small Canadian investor.  The links and section headers are mine.   Tom Konrad. Motivation The goal of this article is to assist with your future investments by explaining investment options, how they work and potential alternatives that may be of interest to you. The take away I’m looking for is with a little research you can...

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...

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...

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...

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 If you don't know what could go wrong in 2010, it could still hurt your portfolio. In Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, he describes an exercise at one of his early jobs.  In order to become aware of risks they otherwise might have overlooked, they were to assume that they would lose all the money under their management in the coming year, and they work backwards to figure out how that might have happened. This struck me as an excellent idea, which investors...

Tom Konrad CFA Blood In the Streets Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild Image via Wikipedia Baron Rothschild was an 18th century British nobleman who supposedly originated the phrase "Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own."  Although accounts differ, Rothschild was a successful banker, and supposedly made a fortune buying in the panic that followed the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon. True or not, the...

Tom Konrad CFA Storm Sailor (Photo credit: Abaconda) Sailing into a Storm Despite the unresolved European debt crisis and America’s fiscal cliff, stock markets remain buoyant.   With politicians bickering, that is mostly due to aggressive action from central banks.  Yet despite the Federal Reserve’s third (and largest) round of quantitative easing (QE3) and the European Central Bank‘s unlimited bond buying program, politicians still have the capacity to throw a monkey wrench in the world economy.  Worse, doing nothing is all they have to do to mess things up.  Doing nothing is what politicians...

Garvin Jabusch Innovation and increasing economic efficiency have always been the keys to profits and wealth. Getting more value out of systems without commensurate increases in inputs is the definition of growing efficiency, and it has been the engine of human economies since someone figured out how to use energy from a water wheel to grind grain instead of doing it by hand with a stone bowl and pestle. With that development (to simplify), a couple family members could run the wheel, freeing up everyone else for other pursuits. This kind of gain is the hallmark, to greater and...