Lee Foresight Investing

A Complete Guide to Finding Your Next Great Trade
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-0983-4123-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 380 Seiten

If you want to be in the right place at the right time, it pays to show up a few minutes early. Fortunes can be made by finding 'the next big thing.' Some of the best investments over the past few years came from Silicon Valley. Over the next decade, we'll see even bigger opportunities from the internet of things (IoT), 5G, augmented reality, cryptocurrencies, automation, artificial intelligence, longevity science, and new sources of energy. Foresight Investing provides a remarkable toolbox for improving your trading skills. These tools will help you identify where to find the best opportunities, what companies to invest in, when to buy and sell, and understand why news events can influence the market. Loaded with insights from a top-performing strategist, this might be the last book about investing that you'll ever need.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lee, James

Leseproben

New Energy
What is energy? It seems like a simple question. Energy is flow. If you can capture the flow between an area where you have a lot of something to where you have much less of it, you can use that flow to do all sorts of things. Warm a house. Power a laptop. Fly a plane. That “something” could be almost anything—wind, air, water, electrons, photons, heat, etc. These things can easily change into something else. When I was a kid, my dad would do all kinds of experiments in his workshop. He built some “perpetual motion” machines just for fun. In the process he found out that they all received their power from somewhere. A favorite invention of his was a windmill that would just sit on the shelf, doing nothing. When you held the windmill in your palm, though, it would start to spin, without any sign of a breeze. The toy harvested energy from your hands. Or, more specifically, it gathered your warmth and turned that into rotational force by means of thermal convection. There was also the time when he wired us kids up to a fancy-looking oscilloscope to prove that we were constantly generating electric currents within our bodies—roughly 2 or 3 watts to be exact. My sister’s crystal radio seemed like magic. Using a small piece of galenite, a wire, and a tiny speaker, she could convert radio waves to sound. How amazing is that? I learned early that energy is everywhere—not always in massive quantities, but just enough to do small stuff. Now think about the Internet of Things (IoT) and the future of personal devices. Will we be able to use these ambient sources of energy to provide electric power without wires or batteries? It is quite possible that the coming decades will be marked by an abundance of energy and not a scarcity. This could happen once we change a few things. Before we travel into the future, let’s visit the recent past. The Petroleum Century Industry in the twentieth century was powered by petroleum. When the Spindletop gusher was discovered in 1901, it modernized the petroleum industry and made a fortune for the Rockefeller family. What is the secret behind petroleum? The murky, gooey stuff we call “black gold” is liquid sunlight. Crude oil is a fossil fuel made by the decaying remains of aquatic plants. Most of the Earth’s oil was formed between 60 and 250 million years ago. Over the course of their lifetimes, aquatic plants store carbon from photosynthesis before dropping to the bottom of the ocean floor. The stored hydrogen and carbon molecules are what gives fuel its potency. Oil is particularly energy-dense. This makes oil more practical to carry around as a fuel—far more useful than firewood or coal. While oil can be used for such things as home heating, the main energy use has been for transportation. Cars, trucks, jets, and boats all use oil. But oil also provided the materials for many other familiar twentieth century products, including asphalt, paints, pesticides, plastics, and fertilizers. Anytime you hear the word chemistry, you might also think petroleum. Oil is an energy commodity and also a feedstock for basic materials. One question worth asking is whether or not we should be burning the same natural resources that we need to make stuff. We are depleting oil far more quickly than we are discovering it, with some estimates suggesting that global production shortfalls will exist by 2070.1 Of the five largest oil fields in the U.S.—Permian Basin, Prudhoe Bay, Barnett, Eagle Ford, and Bakken—only the Permian Basin is not in decline. Production boosts from horizontal drilling, fracking, seismic imaging, and tar sands will likely be short-lived. Industry expert Art Berman refers to fracking as “a retirement party for petroleum engineers.”2 Exxon Mobil’s petroleum reserves have been falling for decades. It has been quietly disappearing since it was the largest publicly traded company in the world just a decade ago. Price collapse and subsequent disinvestment in production during the early 2020s may lead to a tradable price spike for oil by 2023–24. However, investing in a depleting and unsustainable asset is a challenge for the long term. Now and Near The future is becoming electric. It’s not coal, oil, or nuclear. Coal is just antiquated, oil will increasingly be used to make stuff, and clean nuclear fusion is still ten to twenty (or more) years away. Natural gas still has a future—it is relatively clean, cheap, and abundant. The infrastructure exists for its distribution in the U.S., and it is currently the preferred means of power generation for electric utilities. But, like oil, it won’t last forever. Exactly how that electric power will be produced is still subject to considerable debate. We may be transitioning from the “age of combustion” to the “age of electrochemical conversion.” A related question is what makes the world go around. Will it be the internal combustion engine or the electric motor? One is cleaner and more sustainable than the other. There is some good news here. Overall energy consumption in the U.S. peaked in 2007 and has been moving sideways for roughly fifteen years.3 Call it negawatts—energy not consumed is energy that doesn’t need to be produced. This is a big story that the media somehow missed. Decoupling energy consumption from economic growth is a new trend. It involves growing more while needing less. Solar and Renewables Continue to Grow Renewable energy sources supplied roughly 11 percent of U.S. energy consumption as of 2018, a small fraction that is growing rapidly. Between 2009 and 2019, solar energy production grew fortyfold in the U.S., while wind energy tripled.4 Over 361,000 electric vehicles were sold in 2018, up from close to zero in 2009. Beyond solar and wind, some would include biomass in the renewable category (sugar-based ethanols and algal-based biodiesel). These can be grown, converted to fuel, used, then regrown. Hydroelectric power may be considered renewable as well, along with wave energy and oceanic thermal energy conversion (OTEC).5 A recent report by Stanford University shows that close to all of the world’s energy needs could be produced from renewable sources by 2050.6 Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Maine, New York, and Washington state all have established targets for 100 percent clean energy.7 The economics are beginning to make sense. The costs of utility-scale renewable energy are already equal to or lower than the costs of power generated by the cheapest fossil fuels. Grid parity is already happening in the U.S. and abroad. However, alternative energy sources present their own unique challenges. For example, electricity generated by renewable sources needs to be translated into something that our power lines can handle. Inverters convert power from direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC), which our plugged-in devices run on. Inverters allow power from solar, wind, and batteries to connect to and supply the grid. Companies in this category include Advanced Energy Industries (AEIS), Enphase Energy (ENPH), and SolarEdge (SEDG). Another challenge is that the productivity of renewable energy changes with the weather (wind, rain, or sun). This leads to uncontrollable surges in energy production, which either needs to be stored or is wasted. Batteries and Storage Revolution Today’s holy grail of energy research isn’t fusion; it is simply finding a better way to store electricity. Ninety percent of the electricity in the U.S. is stored in water towers. These are a common feature of the American landscape, yet most people believe they just store water. Here is how they really work: Utilities use excess power to pump water up into the tower, and gravity pulls water back down when power is needed. A small hydropower turbine at the base converts the flow of water back to electricity. If this sounds a little primitive, well, maybe it is. There is a better way to store electricity. This is what batteries are made for. The first rechargeable lead-acid batteries were invented in 1859. They were used in early automobiles, but they suffered from problems with weight and poor energy density. Nickel-cadmium batteries came on the scene in the late 1890s, but they were expensive. Sony introduced the first lithium-ion battery in 1991, after decades of research. Today, we are still using those batteries to power everything...