Author Archives: L J Furman, MBA

About L J Furman, MBA

Analyst here and Director of Information Technology with an MBA in Managing for Sustainability.

Energy Portfolios, 23 Months: Sustainable Energy DOUBLED, Fossil Fuels DOWN (slightly)

PLPort.2014.11.21On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. At the close of trading, Nov. 21, 2014, that would be worth $24.3 Million and all of the increase is in the sustainable energy portfolio.

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 36.05 % from 12/21/12 to 11/21/14.
  • The S&P 500 is up 44.34% from 12/21/12.
  • The Fossil Fuel Portfolio has DROPPED 0.02%.
  • The Sustainable Energy portfolio is up 105.99% from Dec. 21, 2012 but down from August, 2014.

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Energy Portfolios: 22 Months: Sustainable Energy Up But Dropping

PLPort.2014.10.21

On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. Between December 21, 2012 and October 21, 2014

By 10/15/14, GT Advanced Tech had filed for bankruptcy protection, and other stocks in the portfolio dropped to points near their Dec. 2012. The portfolio as a whole dropped 55% from Sept. 19, 2014. Stay tuned, and keep your seat belt on. Continue reading

Ft. Calhoun Plant – Reopened After 2 Years, 8 Months and Over $970 Million

Fort Calhoun plant, seen from above.

Ft Calhoun Plant – Arial View

The Fort Calhoun nuclear plant reopened in December, 2013. The plant, on the west bank of the Missouri River about 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska, closed for refueling in April, 2011, and was flooded in June, 2011. Refueling a nuclear plant typically takes about 6 – 12 weeks. Due to the flooding, the Fort Calhoun plant was closed for 970 days, from April, 2011 until December, 2013. (NY Times / Associated Press, here). Back in June, 2011, the cost estimate by David Lochbaum, Union of Concerned Scientists, was roughly $970 Million in lost revenue, plus the costs of repairs. Continue reading

Energy Portfolios – Simple Analysis re the Fossil Fuel Portfolio

The Deepwater Horizon Spill

The Deepwater Horizon Spill

“You can’t have oil without oil spills.” – Markwayne Mullin, R, Oklahoma. (Official / GovTrack)

Wind and Sun Won’t Spill

In a period when the Dow Industrials rose 30%, the S&P 500 rose 40%, and the Popular Logistics “Sustainable Energy Portfolio” rose 223%, the “Fossil Fuel Portfolio” rose 21%.

This suggests that a paradigm shift is underway in the energy industry.

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Energy Portfolios: 20 Months: Conclusions & Observations

PL_Port_1408Conclusions:

  1. The performance of most of the companies in these portfolios supports the hypothesis that a paradigm shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy systems is underway.
  2. Investing in an index fund may have been more lucrative – and less stressful – than investing in the Fossil Fuel portfolio.
  3. Investing in paradigm shifting technology, i.e., First Solar, Sunpower, GT Advanced Technology and Vestas may be very lucrative.
  4. A diversified portfolio in paradigm shifting technology may also be effective. The “home runs” will more than make up for the “strike-outs.”
  5. Investing in a well-run, or well-connected, company, i.e., Haliburton, in a declining industry may also be lucrative.

Observations:

  1. The long term trend appears to be that investments in Sustainable Energy are likely to pay off in the long term and also, probably, the short term.
  2. Investments in Fossil Fuels, however do not appear likely to appreciate in the near future, even in a “Bull Market,” such as we appear to be in.  However, a speculator, i.e., a gambler, may be able to play various fossil fuel stocks, buying at lows and selling at highs. While I am not an investment professional, I personally, don’t know if this is worth the risk. I prefer to do my gambling in Atlantic City, New Jersey and Las Vegas, Nevada.
  3. When considered against the backdrop of global geopolitics, i.e., Russia, which exports oil and methane, invading Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq and Syria threatening to take over Iraqi oil operations, other turmoil in the Middle East, a paradigm shift away from fossil fuels seems likely to insulate energy flows from remote geopolitical events and strengthen economies that have executed this paradigm shift. Therefore, investments supporting such a paradigm shift may do well, while investments supporting the existing paradigm may not.

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Energy Portfolios, 20 Months: Sustainable Energy up 229%, Fossil Fuel up 18.4%

PL_Port_1408On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; $8.0 iMil in the Sustainable Energy space and $8.0 iMil in the fossil fuel space.

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 30.16 % from 12/21/12.

  • The S&P 500 is up 39.3% from 12/21/12.

  • The Fossil Fuel Portfolio continues to dramatically underperform the reference indices. It is up 18.36% from Dec. 21, 2012 and down 5.67% from July, 2014.

  • The Sustainable Energy portfolio is up 229.19% from Dec. 21, 2012.

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Energy Portfolios: 19 Months: Sustainable up 222%, Fossil Fuel up 25%

PLPortfolio.1407aOn Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. Here are the results since Dec. 21, 2012:

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 30.26%.
  • The S&P 500 is up 38.04%.
  • The Fossil Fuel Portfolio is continues to dramatically underperform the reference indices. It is up 25.08% from Dec. 21, 2012.
  • The Sustainable Energy portfolio is down 11% from last month, but is up 221.77% from Dec. 21, 2012.

The details are below.

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Roller Coasters, Solar Power, Wind Power or Terrorist Tunnels

Qatari Emir w Ismail Haniya, Oct. 2012

Qatari Emir Hamad al-Thani with Ismail Haniya, Oct. 2012, Photo NY Times.

In October, 2012, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, as reported in the NY Times, here, “pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects” in Gaza.

The $400 Million could have built 133 MW of offshore wind or 100 MW of PV Solar electricity generation capacity.

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Universal Databases, Marilyn Monroe & Scarlett Johansson

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe

Scarlett Johansson

Scarlett Johansson

Relational Databases, RDBMSs, circa 1999, such as DB2, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Informix and Sybase, implementations of E. F. Codd‘s work at IBM and built according to Codd’s 12 Rules, are effective for solving OnLine Transaction Processing, or OLTP problems. These might be termed “Blue Quadrant” problems, if you consider Stonebraker’s Matrix, 1, below.

X-Ray of broken arm,  courtesy of C. Bethel, MD, and A. Dean, MD.

Broken arm, courtesy C. Bethel, MD, and A. Dean, MD.

They are billing systems, trading systems – accounting systems.  Relational databases are useful for tracking widgets and money, as long as those widgets can be described with words or numbers.  Processing simple data, even with a high volume of transactions.

Relational databases could also be used to store images, such as those of Scarlett Johansson or Marilyn Monroe, above, or X-Rays, left. However, these are stored in the database as Binary Large Objects, aka “BLOBs.” While RDBMSs could operate on large volumes of data in various ways, there are just two operations they could do on on BLOBs: store and retrieve.  They could not query on intrinsic properties of a BLOB. They could query on data that describe a BLOB, but not the BLOB itself. There is no other processing in a traditional RDBMS. And they could not search on images, only on text describing images.

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Energy Portfolios, 18 Months, Analysis

EnergyPortfolios_Indices_2014_06 We are watching a paradigm shift.

How else can we explain the dramatic rise of the Sustainable Energy portfolio, the equally dramatic underperformance of the Fossil Fuel portfolio, compared to the Dow Industrials and the S&P 500 since I started this experiment on Dec. 21, 2012? The data are in my post of June 24, 2014, Energy Portfolios, 18 Months: Sustainable up 257%, Fossil Fuels up 24.6%.

Consider these questions:

  1. Which companies are Disruptive or Subject to Disruption?
  2. Which companies are Evolving and which are doing what worked for the last 20/30/50/80 years?
  3. Can management execute?
  4. Is management asking for government subsidies?
  5. What about the long term side effects? What are the Economic Externalities?

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Energy Portfolios: 18 Months: Sustainable up 257.06%: Fossil Fuel up 24.56%

PL_EnergyPort_14_06On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. In the 18 months between the close of trading December 21, 2012 and the close of trading June 20, 2014,

  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 29.46% from 12/21/12.
  • The S&P 500 is up 37.27%.
  • The Fossil Fuel Portfolio is up 24.56% from Dec. 21, 2012.
  • The Sustainable Energy portfolio is up 257.06% from Dec. 21, 2012.

In addition to the data summary, below, this post, the 21st in the series, will be followed with a summary analysis.

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“Software as a Service” in “The Cloud” before we called it “Software as a Service in The Cloud”

Indoor Cloud. Courtesy 'Where Cool Things Happen.' com

Indoor Cloud. Courtesy ‘Where Cool Things Happen.’ com

Before We Called it “The Cloud” … We Still Had “Software as a Service.” We just didn’t know what Marketing wanted to call it.

Back in 1990 – ’91, before we called it “The Cloud,” before most of us used the Internet, when we were young and idealistic, I worked on three systems that offered what we would now call SaaS – Software as a Service.

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Is Fukushima Melting Antarctic Ice?

Image of Explosion at Fukushima

Fukushima Explosion, Courtesy Forbes

A lot of people have been talking about a new dawn of nuclear power (Telegraph, article from 2013 here).  “Fukushima,” they say, perversely, “proves nuclear is safe because only 3 reactors melted down.” They also say, “a culture of safety can make or break nuclear power.” (Japan Times, op-ed, here).

I think these people are not asking the right questions.

For example, the melt-rate of Antarctic ice has double since before 2010, that is since before Fukushima. Andrew Freedman on Mashable, here, and Phil Plait, on Slate, here wrote about a scientific study, accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters which documents the increase in the rate at which Antarctic ice is melting. The study attributes this increased ice-melt-rate to rising ocean temperatures. The conventional wisdom is that “The increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing ocean temperatures to rise.” But … what if this is only part of the problem?

What effect, if any, does the release of radiation from the Fukushima melt-down have on ocean temperature and therefore, the rate of melting ice?

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Limits to the Cloud

Image of a function illustrating limits,courtesy One Sage Calculus

Image of a limit courtesy One Sage Math Calculus Tutorial

While Amazon Redshift offers “fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service… for just $0.25 per hour with no commitments or upfront costs and scale to a petabyte or more for $1,000 per terabyte per year” (and I can do it for less – see below) there are limits to the cloud.

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Energy Portfolios: 17 Months: Sustainable up 211.6%: Fossil Fuel up 18.52%

EnergyPortfolios_1405aThe Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 26.29% from 12/21/12.
The S&P 500 is up 32.03%.
The Fossil Fuel Portfolio is up 18.52% from Dec. 21, 2012.
The Sustainable Energy Portfolio is up 211.6% from Dec. 21, 2012. Continue reading