the happy few: my alternative energy stocks
This exercise is a test of my financial prose-writing skills and is a journal entry recording what the hell was I thinking. By no means do I flatter myself, talking about my investments and my process is embarrassingly simplistic:
- purchase tens of a stock, rarely over 50$/share
- hold, like a hibernating animal
- should the value double, sell half to get my initial investment back
This is not day trading. This is more like carbonite-freeze trading.
The most spectacular profit taking from my dirt-simple scheme was when I held MSFT for over a decade, entering at about $30/share. Welcome to bumpkin value investing!
One of my ‘alternative energy’ stocks that doubled on my watch was MGA. I consider Magna International an alternative energy play because they are investing in battery electric vehicle (BEV) “skateboards.” Their CES 2021 presentation “Complete Vehicle Expertise” shows off their foray into white-labeling an electric vehicle platform.
Magna can invest in BEV stuff because they are a major OEM for ICE vehicle manufacturing. I learned about Magna from John McElroy of Autoline fame. This is my sleazy, weaselly way of investing in a huge swath of a filthy, Earth-killing market without investing directly in the usual suspects that escaped the dystopian decay of 20th-century Detroit. This is a low-intelligence way to treat a stock like an index fund—a lesson I learned from over a decade staring at MSFT shares.
MGA is probably the third “green” stock I invested in. In order of appearance, here are my holdings:
GCBLX is a pure, idealistic, academic exercise by a college kid from the 1990s. It is an antique called mutual fund where you actually own pieces of companies—unlike the relatively new ETFs. My cost basis of $500 is about $700 as of this writing. Nice.
CSIQ is a way to show my respects to the Chinese presence in the Canadian real estate market (solar panels on top the houses instead of the land under the house). It is also a way to invest in the Chinese move toward renewable energy (they are denigrated by fossil fuel pundits for flooding the market with cheap solar panels) without investing directly in an explicitly non-democratic government. Like MGA this position made itself available to my primitive, profit-taking scheme.
NKLA is a monument to me being robbed by an ousted CEO that is a liar. This is the price I have literally paid to invest in hydrogen-based big-rig technology (which I still think is viable) without giving my money directly to Elon Musk.
FUV is an homage to small, alternative energy companies based in California. It is a currently-money-losing love letter to the future of California as world leader in non-fossil-fuel industry and beach-bum life.
CCIV is a plaything of billionaires called a SPAC. My position here, represents yet another savage attack on Elon Musk through giving the work of his ex-employee Peter Rawlinson a few bucks. I am losing money here as well at the moment. I should not even mention in public (or in private) that I actually bought shares of LCDX by mistake because the L in LCDX used to stand for Lucid. What was I thinking!
QS has Bill Gates for an investor (back to MSFT again). Just last year, the share price was quite reasonable; then it was beyond my grasp and recently, due to the slander of short sellers, it became affordable again. I consider this stock an viable alternative to LG Chem (XKRX) which is probably stupid (and I do not know how to invest in Korean stocks in particular and foreign stocks in general—apart from my 10 shares of NOK). I was easily impressed by the Munro Live interview, “Interview: Jagdeep Singh, Founder & CEO of QuantumScape.”
my primitive, profit-taking scheme will not work without dividends
I have used the phrase ‘get my initial investment back’ while describing my profit taking scheme. This can only happen when stock dividends (and some long-term capital gains) are greater than inflation.
I assume there is some great portfolio tool out there to help me calculate this before I resort to whipping up a Jupyter Notebook when I somehow have the pathetic spare time to look into this.
rare earth? wasn’t that a band from the 1970s?
Yes, I am dilettante shopper for ‘alternative energy’ investments. Out of my ignorance, I will run out of BEV media darlings and start to look into how batteries are made with capitalist bias. According to Jeremy Grantham, rare earth commodities are needed for the “green revolution” and, as of this writing, China is far in the lead in the rare-earth processing race.
And let’s not get started on copper. Let’s not get Tony Greer started.