I hope you had a
terrific Christmas . . . and I mean that in
the most heartfelt secular humanist way.
I did. I was surrounded by
terrific nieces and nephews. I formed
what I truly believe was a meaningful bond with our twelfth (give or take), Patrick,
age 1, who seemed genuinely to respond to my humor.
I got everything
I asked Santa for except world peace and an end to the writers’ strike, without
which I am in excruciating limbo.
Help! I am clueless to the
unfolding of the Darling Family
fortunes, Chuck’s exploits, The Office romance, and – my God – Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy
and Tracy Jordan . . . what have they been doing?
I admit it, I love TiVo-enabled
commercial-free television. And that’s
as good a lead-in as any to today’s topic.
Today’s topic is WORLD-CHANGING TECHNOLOGICAL
PROGRESS.
- That’s what television was . . .
TELEVISION
Bob Novick: “Aaron Sorkin’s play is HIGHLY HIGHLY exaggerated if not outright lies. Farnsworth won the court decision and was awarded one million dollars (in the 1930s). It was the only patent suit that RCA had lost up until that time. There are major inaccuracies in the play – this site lists them in detail. Philo T. Farnsworth truly was the father of television.”
F One of the books Sorkin based his
play on, The Last Lone Inventor, by Evan Schwartz, makes that case. But a Brit reviewing it on Amazon,
says no. (“The American audience will
love this highly readable popularist book. This is
flag-waving entertaining stuff. Enjoy it, but please try to understand that
this is not the whole story.”) I still
loved the play, and this after-reading just adds to the fascination.
- And that’s what cheap solar energy would be . . .
SOLAR ENERGY
In the winter of
1974 I had a cover story in NEW YORK Magazine about the potential for solar
energy. I knew it was important – OPEC
and Mideast oil were all anyone could think about (except Detroit’s executives, who would spend the
next three decades in denial) – but I was surprised to learn my piece was going
to be the cover. It seemed a bit of a
stretch to have the piece in NEW YORK
at all, let alone the cover. What was
famed editor Clay Felker thinking?
It turned out he
was thinking, “Let’s sell some magazines!”
He put a gorgeous
model in a bikini absorbing rays on a float in the middle of a swimming pool. In February.
I’m not certain
how well the issue sold, but finally, nearly 35 years
later, solar energy is becoming sexy on its own.
You could (for
example) have done very well buying First Solar (FSLR) at 24 when it went
public a year ago (I missed it); less well shorting a few shares as I did this
fall at $160 (it closed yesterday at $281, up more than tenfold).
Although this stings a bit as an investor, I’m delighted to think we
are finally at the point, or nearly so, that solar panel film can produce
electricity at competitive prices.
To say I am not
expert in this field would be an understatement on the order of “the sun is
rather hot.” But according to this,
FSLR’s cost of producing a watt of solar power was
$1.16 recently . . . and according to this,
a privately owned competitor called Nanosolar has
begun selling its panels for 99 cents a watt, which (according to this)
it manufactures for 30 cents . . . which puts the cost of solar below the cost of coal.
This is great for
humanity, but not necessarily good for FSLR.
If your competition can sell
your product for less than it costs you to make
your product, you could have a problem. Then
again, who knows what tech advances FSLR may have up its sleeve or what economies
of scale it might achieve (or whether these reports are even accurate). And the market for competitively priced solar
power will be so vast, a lot of inefficiencies may be
forgiven along the way.
So to be clear, I am not suggesting you
short FSLR – or anything else. As I have
often argued (here, for
example), shorting stocks is, ordinarily,
a really bad idea . . . a proposition I test out every so often on your behalf
just to be sure it’s still true.
[Another bad idea
I am testing out for you (think of me as the dummy in one of those crash tests
that ultimately help to keep the rest of us safe): selling naked FSLR calls (a terrible idea, because, as with shorting,
you have a potentially unlimited loss; but unlike shorting, you have a smaller
potential gain if you’re right). I am
doing this because the excitement over FSLR is such that today, with the stock
at $281, someone paid me $76 for the right to buy FSLR from me at $300 any time
through January 17, 2009. That way, if
it crashes, they lose “only” $76 (which I get to keep); but if it goes to the
moon, they make (and I lose), $1 for each dollar the stock has risen above $376. So it’s a way for me to short the stock at
$376, in effect, when it’s selling at $280. What I give up for that cushion is
anything beyond a $76-a-share gain.]
Important note: I
am not winking when I say this is a really dumb thing to do unless you have a lot
of experience in the market and even more experience knowing your own psychology. And even then it may well be a dumb thing to
do, as my experience will likely shortly prove.
#
THE MAIN THING: CAN YOU IMAGINE?
WE’RE GETTING CLOSE TO A BIG STEP TOWARD CLEAN,
AFFORDABLE ENERGY.
Don’t Sell Humanity Short Quite Yet.