General Electric has demonstrated a new, low cost technology for producing LED lighting.   If it proves successful and competitive in quality, it could have significant impacts on the speed at which LED’s will come to dominate future lighting technologies and at which the vast efficiency improvements of LED’s will reduce the consumption of electricity.  It also might allow G.E. to dominate the LED field and possibly hurt the competitive position of CREE, Inc.  Since CREE stock sells at a high multiple of estimated 2009 earnings, which estimates are coming down, …

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2008 Thus Far: A Preview of Coming Attractions

My concern has been that at some point shortages of oil will cause a falling-stocks, rising-oil phenomenon that will crush my oil related stocks along with the whole market. 2008 has started like that. Oil was up 6.34% as of 2/29 (per the ETF symbol OIL) but stocks were down 8.5% (in terms of the S&P 500 ETF symbol SPY). For oil-related stocks, the falling stock market trumped the rising oil market, as I have expected. IYE, a broad-based oil-stock ETF, was down …

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One of my investment themes is that LED’s will be the dominant lighting technology of the future.  Since LED’s are based on silicon chips and since chip-based products have such a strong history of rapid quality improvement and cost reduction, I think LED’s will become better and better and will cost less and less over time.  Their energy efficiency is already the best and their longevity is also a proven quality. 

One  corollary of the eventual triumph of LED’s is that compact fluorescents are a passing fad.    The problems of CFL’s include …

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Tom Konrad has written about two LED companies that he thinks are worthy of a speculative investment.   His views are always worth considering.   He wrote:

Cree, Inc. (CREE), and Lighting Science Group (LSGP.OB).

I’ve been invested in both of these for a long time, and last wrote about these LED stocks in June. I sold half the holdings of many of my managed accounts soon after that article when CREE was around $27-$30, about double the price at which I’d bought them. Smaller positions in Lighting Science …

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Transition to the Electric Economy

New year’s day is a good time for long term thinking and planning. Today I want to relate some fairly visible long term prospects for global energy changes to a few of their more obscure short term investment implications that are actionable.

The great game of the next era in human use of energy is going to be the transition from a petro/electric economy to a fully electric one, motivated by the end of affordable fossil fuels. Transportation is the name of this game because it uses …

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With LED light bulbs lasting upward of 50,000 hours vs. 1,000 for many incandescents, one would think a majority of consumers would embrace the new technology for their homes.  Consumers balk at cost, but once the price of LEDs drop below $10 the adoption curve really begins to take off – and at $5 nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) would consider replacing all their household bulbs with LEDs. read full post

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