Showing posts with label Nick Hodges. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nick Hodges. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

The Most Popular Letter of the Year



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From: Energy and Capital <eac-eletter@angelnexus.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 1:08 AM
Subject: The Most Popular Letter of the Year




The Year's Most Popular Letter:  America in Decline

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The Most Popular Letter of the Year
By Nick Hodge | Tuesday, December 25th, 2012
Nick Hodge
Dear Reader,
Our idea for today was to send you the most popular article of the year.
Unfortunately, in the times we live in, your favorite articles don't do much for spreading holiday cheer... We don't wear rose-colored glasses around here. We like to think that's why you read us.
So, at the risk of being labeled a Scrooge, here's a reprinting of the article Energy and Capital readers chose as the most-liked of the year. 
Enjoy...
Nick

America sucks.
It hasn't always. But it does right now. And it doesn't have to stay that way. You can change it...
Of course, some people won't agree with me. They'll say it's the greatest nation on earth. The freest. Home of the brave.
To them I ask: Would the freest nation on earth publicly execute a wheelchair-bound double amputee at a home for the mentally ill?
It happened recently in Houston. The courageous men in blue there opened fire on the man who was wielding a pen after he demanded a cigarette and a soda.
This guy had one arm and one leg and was mentally ill. Houston cops shot him in the head.
How brave they were. How free we are.
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Al Gore Dumps Green Energy!
According to the Washington Post, Al Gore made $100 million from investing in government-backed "green" energy firms...
Now he can't get out of them fast enough!
And it's no wonder, as dozens of these epic failures continue to drop like flies after gorging themselves on $90 billion of your money.
Get all the scandalous details right here. 

Six Michigan police fired 46 bullets at a mentally ill homeless man in July.
Michigan's finest, well-trained, and noble officers hit the man 11 times — with fewer than 25% of their shots.
Two of those fine Michigan men have been reprimanded; one has been demoted. Their names were not released.
These are the kind of militarized morons policing our country. Protecting us no more, their job is to instill fear and keep the populace at bay.
But that's how it is, isn't it? A veil of secrecy has been erected between the government (and its enforcers) and the people.
You vote for a candidate who pledges to do X or to repeal Y, and what do you get? Nothing. Their agenda is their own, formulated at the request of the highest bidder, meant only to further entrench their power and line their pockets...
Big Pharma. Big Retail. Big Tobacco. Big Health Care. Big Oil. Big Agriculture. Big Banks. Big Government.
Take Two Every 8 Hours, Stay Off Drugs
Prescription pills kill 140,000 people every year in the United States, severely injure one million, and send two million to the hospital.Big Pharma
Side effects include brain damage, stroke, pulmonary disease, cardiac arrest, perforated ulcers, cancer, liver failure, and addiction.
Those are legal drugs.
Illegal drugs kill about 5,000 Americans per year, mostly from cocaine and heroine.
Tell me, on which drugs should we wage a war?
The facts are clear. But Big Government and Big Pharma — which spends $100 million per year lobbying (bribing) politicians — can't get a cut from the "bad" drugs.
So 1.5 million Americans are locked up each year for illegal drug-related crimes, while Big Pharma drug reps make great livings taking doctors out for expensive lunches every day so they push their pills. 
And 80% of those 1.5 million arrests are for possession, so those fine cops mentioned earlier aren't even getting the distributors.
What's more, 44% of possession arrests are for marijuana — which kills no one — rather than for the harder stuff that does.
Yet since the 1980s over a quarter-trillion of your tax dollars have gone to fight a war on drugs that kills millions fewer people than the legal ones executives and congressmen are profiting from.
Drug dealing isn't drug dealing when it's state sanctioned.
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Massive Revalue: Gold as a Tier 1 Asset
The biggest upside catalyst for gold is a massive reevaluation by the Basel Committee of Bank Supervision.
BCBS sets the international rules for banks. Currently gold is rated as a Tier 3 asset. This means banks can only carry 50% of its market value as capital.
This will change in a few short months...
The Basel Committee is planning on turning gold into a Tier 1 asset so that it can be carried at 100% of its value. The more Tier 1 assets a bank has, the more money it can lend.
This will double the price of gold almost overnight. You must act now! 

To quote Gerald Celente, whose book What Zizi Gave Honeyboy inspired this essay: "It actually all makes perfect sense in a system in which justice is measured by the size of political campaign contributions."
And it's not only pharmaceutical drugs; the hypocrisy is multiplied when you inspect alcohol and tobacco, which do tens of billions each year in sales and spend hundreds of millions bribing so-called 'lawmakers.'
Smoking kills about 450,000 Americans each year. Alcohol kills another 150,000.
But remember, kids, Altria (Philip Morris), Anheuser-Busch, and Pfizer bribe the government. They have sales goals to meet. Pot growers don't.
Shit: It's What's for Dinner
Lamar Carter is a cattle farmer. He feeds his cows shit.
He's cited in a U.S. News & World report as buying 745 tons of chicken scat and stacking it 12 feet high on his farm. After it sits for seven to 10 days, it's mixed with a small amount of soy bran... and fed to his hundreds of cows.
He's quoted as saying: "My cows are fat as butterballs. If I didn't have chicken litter, I'd have to sell half my herd. Other feed's too expensive."
You may have also heard the recent story going around about another cattle farmer feeding candy to his cows.
And I shouldn't have to recount the squalid conditions your beef and chicken inhabit while alive, injected with hormones and antibiotics (half of the antibiotics made in the U.S. are for animals), starved, and then force-fed to Industrial Chicken Farmingproduce bigger eggs, wading in their own feces until they die.
I won't even tell you where millions of euthanized dogs and cats end up.
Is it any surprise 80 million Americans contract a foodborne illness annually (over a quarter of the population), 9,000 of them meeting their maker because of it?
Have you noticed there were no warnings for eating undercooked meat or eggs 20 years ago?
But like drugs, where does the regulator's hammer come down?
Surely not on the Hormels, Cargills, Tysons, and Perdues who are so profit-hungry they feed the animals you eat feces... but on the small mom-and-pop farmers trying to make it on their own selling all-natural beef, chicken, and vegetables.
In many states, it's illegal to sell raw milk. In others, small farms have been raided at gunpoint. (By whom? By those lovely militarized police we talked about earlier.)
Guess which operations have enough to bribe the lawmakers you elected?
And then those politicians have the gumption to decry the loss of small businesses during their election campaigns when it's them putting them out of business.
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America!
I could go on and on about the current injustices plaguing the American system. (And I will next week... and the one after that.)
Like how your Nobel Peace Prize-winning president increased troop levels in Afghanistan, a so-called "troop surge," who are now coming home and "leaving behind an uncertain landscape of rising violence and political instability that threatens to undo considerable gains in security," as the NYT reported last week.
Last year was the deadliest year for American troops in Afghanistan since the war began. This year could rival it.
Soldier suicides are at an all-time high, and are beginning to outpace deaths on the battlefield. That's some kinda peace.
There was once a time when leaders like Washington and Eisenhower actually led wars. And they knew the desperation it caused — and that it should be used only as a last result.
Now we carry on wars for years, the suffering felt only by the lower classes, while draft-dodgers, community organizers, and Mormon teachers decry its necessity having never witnessed first-hand its atrocities. If they want a war so bad, I say give them a rucksack and rifle and send them out there.
Try to guess how much money Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrup Grumman spend taking your elected officials out to dinner. (It was up 11.5% in the first quarter this year to just under $16 million.)
Or how about the constant flow of banking scams at the highest level, only to never see any major prosecutions or law changes...
You might understand why if you knew the banks and their political action committees (bribe squads) spent nearly $20 million on political candidates — Democrat and Republican — in 2010.
Banks like JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America have spent $16 million since 2011 trying to get people elected who make or bend laws in their favor. Congressmen, on average, get $20,000 per year from the banks. Senators get about $30,000, but it was up near $100,000 leading up to the implosion of our economy.
No wonder they continue to bill this as "the greatest nation on earth"...
They're making money hand over fist while everyone else struggles.Banker Chess
What I don't understand is why the majority continue to buy into it.
It was Hitler who said if you repeat the same lie often enough, people will eventually believe it.
So How Great Is It?
It's great enough that Americans now work 160 more hours per year than they did 20 years ago.
And for what?
How's your purchasing power? Your home value? Your savings account?
It's no wonder a majority of people think the country is suffering from a moral breakdown.
To quote from Celente's book:
If the "American way" was working so well, why was "stress" cited as the primary cause for the 25% increase in sick days? Why do stress-related problems account for 60% to 90% of doctors' visits in the United States?
If "life has gotten better," why are 5% of our children being fed Ritalin to calm them down, and why are we gulping down more than a million dollars' worth of Prozac a day to keep steady?
I think it's because they're chasing a dream they know they can't attain — or worse, no longer even exists.
Advertisement

The Wal-Mart "Triple Dividend" Secret
Wal-Mart currently pays a 2.6% dividend. Not bad for one of the most stable companies in the entire world...
But there's an easy way you can stick with Wal-Mart — and triple that dividend payment.

Almost one-third of Americans say they've been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
For years now there's been a growing sense of something being truly wrong with our country. The Occupy Movement has been the most vocal about it, but they aren't fully representing the problem.
Bankers, for all their faults, are only leveraging the system they live in; the Supreme Court, after all, has affirmed that companies are people, and can donate limitlessly and anonymously to political campaigns.
We've allowed our country to reach a point where we've sold our happiness and sense of community to the highest bidder, and only those at the top of industry and top of government get true profit.
A family of four could once live well on one salary. Now two aren't enough to scrape by.
As Celente concludes in the chapter entitled, "Make money your God and it will plague you like the devil":
If the facts show — and the people say — they're unhappy and morally starved, and large numbers are on the verge of cracking up, is the "American way" delivering on its promise?
When the media and politicians talk about other nations that don't have the financial and material riches of the United States, they tell us the people in those countries are "living in poverty," but as any seasoned world traveler will tell you, "poverty" is a relative term. It can be argued that while people living in poor nations lack our material comforts, many of them possess the wealth of community and the family prosperity that has dissipated in America and among her people.
A close friend of mine, a mid-level derivatives manager at Citi, recently quit his job to move to South America. An accountant here in my office headed to Melbourne,
Departing isn't the only option, though it is increasingly appealing. I'm going to stick it out here for a while, perhaps on a remote farm, if I can swing it...
Of course, no matter where you choose to live, acquiring and growing capital always makes it easier.
I'll continue to try to help you do that every week — while also wading through the events and policies of a stranger and stranger world.
Call it like you see it,
Nick  Hodge Signature
Nick Hodge
follow basic@nickchodge on Twitter
Nick is an editor of Energy & Capital and the Investment Director of the thousands-strong stock advisory, Early Advantage. Co-author of the best-selling book Investing in Renewable Energy: Making Money on Green Chip Stocks, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world. For more on Nick, take a look at his editor's page.
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This email was sent to jorgeus.george@gmail.com . You can manage your subscription and get our privacy policy here.
Energy and Capital, Copyright © 2012, Angel Publishing LLC, 1012 Morton St, Baltimore, MD 21201. All rights reserved. No statement or expression of opinion, or any other matter herein, directly or indirectly, is an offer or the solicitation of an offer to buy or sell the securities or financial instruments mentioned. While we believe the sources of information to be reliable, we in no way represent or guarantee the accuracy of the statements made herein. Energy and Capital does not provide individual investment counseling, act as an investment advisor, or individually advocate the purchase or sale of any security or investment. Neither the publisher nor the editors are registered investment advisors. Subscribers should not view this publication as offering personalized legal or investment counseling. Investments recommended in this publication should be made only after consulting with your investment advisor and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company in question. Unauthorized reproduction of this newsletter or its contents by Xerography, facsimile, or any other means is illegal and punishable by law.
Please note: It is not our intention to send email to anyone who doesn't want it. If you're not sure why you're getting this e-letter, or no longer wish to receive it, get more info here, including our privacy policy and information on how to manage your subscription.



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Jorgeus George


Friday, September 21, 2012

US competitive advantage

Ateneo Innovation and Entrepreneurship

 From Angel Nexus

Jack Welch earlier said that US is still a leader in innovation.  The manufacturing hub may have migrated to Asia or elsewhere in the world;  but USA holds the advantage on innovation.  However, politics/public sector stifling regulations may be halting innovation.

One such innovation is the 3d printer.  They are great tools in producing prototypes of new products.

They can be had by R&D or manufacturing firms for as little as $l,500 (about  PHP 60,000)  I canvassed one and its about only PHP 80,000 (with VAT and duties).  3d printers speeds up and simplifies product design and prototyping.  The 3d pictures can be printed easily into a 3d mock up.

A car design for instance can be 3d printed.

Nick Hodges on innovation in US.

Innovative companies are best bet in investments and give highest return over the long term.

 "New ideas create more and better new products and services; create more wealth."

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Rare earth metals and new method of metals recovery

Ateneo Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Nick Hodges of Energy and capital wrote about new method of metals recovery. Talvivaara Mining has such a unique process:

l.  Ore is mined and stacked in a heap pad;

2.  Bacteria is sprinkled onto the ore;   water makes the bacteria seep into the ore,   fans feed more of the bacteria into the ore.

3.  Bacteria eats into the ore;  and releases chemicals that eat into the ore;

4.  Metals are recovered, and the solutions coming from the process are sent back to the ore heap.

With a little help from nature.

Investing into this kind of mining means access to precious metals and rare earth.  For example, electric cars, the wave of the future would require plenty of battery power, coming from lithium, a rare earth element, (REE)

"New ideas create more and better new products and services; create more wealth."

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Fwd: The Solar Blood is in the Street - Why Solar Stocks Fall, or Fail

Here is a news feed that explains why despite the features of renewable, as being the solution to our energy woes, solar is not the darling for energy investors.  It has something to do with costs and the vicious cost cycle for raw mat in solar manufacture.  Learn more from the feed.



From: Energy and Capital <eac-eletter@angelnexus.com>
Date: Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:08 PM
Subject: The Solar Blood is in the Street




I've had lots of requests lately  to shed some light on the solar industry, and it isn't hard to see why...

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Refer a Friend to Energy and Capital.
The Solar Blood is in the Street
By Nick Hodge | Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
Nick Hodge
I've had lots of requests lately to shed some light on the solar industry.
And it isn't hard to see why...
Solar Stocks 2012
That's a one-year chart of the Dow Jones versus the Market Vectors Solar Energy ETF (NYSE: KWT), which holds well-known names like First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR), Suntech (NYSE: STP), and SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR).
As you can see, the solar ETF has lost almost 80% of its value. 
Let's see if we can figure out why, draw some historical comparisons, and find a way to make some money from this still nascent market.
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Economies of Scale
Put on your freshman econ hat for a second while I give you a textbook definition:
In economics, economies of scale refers to the cost advantages that an enterprise obtains due to expansion. There are factors that cause a producer's average cost per unit to fall as the scale of output is increased.
Just think about the computer industry, to which I like to compare the solar industry.
In 1946 the first ever general purpose computer weighed 27 tons and cost over $5 million to build.
No company was getting rich selling those. Economies of scale had to be created, whereby the cost of production decreases as more units are produced and more customers are attracted.
I think today is the 1946 of the solar industry.
Dismissing it now would be just as foolish as dismissing the computer industry back then.
Solar Cliff's Notes
The main argument against solar is that it's expensive. That's true — but so was the first computer.
The important thing to notice is that it's getting cheaper.
And at this stage in the game, that's actually detrimental.
When solar stormed on the scene in 2004 and 2005, it was touted as a panacea to rising oil prices and An Inconvenient Truth.
Actually, it's neither.
It's just one part of the energy industry. That said, it's susceptible to the same booms and busts as any other industry.
Back then the main ingredient was polysilicon. And it was expensive... exorbitantly expensive.
It sold for about $100/kilogram in 2006, but more than quadrupled to $400/kilogram by 2008.
Two things happened as a result:
  1. Countries introduced subsidies to help consumers afford solar panels; and
  2. Companies looked for other ways to make solar panels with less or no polysilicon.
The first gave us the feed-in tariff programs in Europe that led to widespread solar adoption in Germany, Spain, and a few others. But as the Great Recession ensued, governments began taking a knife to those subsidies.
The second spawned the development of other solar technologies, like cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS). Those are the technologies used by First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) and Solyndra, respectively.
As it turned out, the monumental spike in polysilicon prices leading up to 2008 was a red herring.
Between then and now, prices have plummeted from $400/kilogram all the way down to $23/kilogram last week.
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Just three short years from now, the United States will reclaim something it lost years ago.
This isn't just some title or bragging right — but perhaps the most important factor affecting modern economics and politics today...
By mid-decade, the U.S. will once again be the world's top oil producer.
It will create more new millionaires in the next couple years than we've seen in the last two decades...
If you want to know exactly how it will be done, click here.

You've already seen the impact that's had on the market.
Cheap silicon is killing competitive technologies.
Solyndra went bankrupt. So did Energy Conversion Devices. First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) has lost 90% of its value since last summer.
Makers of traditional crystalline solar panels have only fared moderately better...
When European nations started cutting subsidies, demand all but collapsed and took German and Chinese solar companies with it.
Q-Cells and SolarWorld were once the most dominant players in the industry. Now they're struggling to survive.
Chinese firms had it so bad, they were selling panels to the United States below market price, which led us to declare a 31% tariff on Chinese-imported panels last week.
The solar blood is in the streets.
Economics Again
Subsidy cuts and margin squeezes are part of an industry's maturation.
Those two hurdles, plus the current oversupply of polysilicon, will ebb.
Current lackluster demand and stiff competition from decade-low natural gas prices are forcing innovation and cost reduction.
There will also be consolidation.
This is all part of an industry's natural growth cycle.
The point here is that the industry is out of favor because prices are falling rapidly. That's what's supposed to happen.
And as prices fall, customers will once again be attracted. You know, all that supply and demand stuff.
In fact, it's already happening...
Solar attracted more than half of all clean energy investments last year, fetching $128 billion — up 44% from 2010. Installations were up 54% to 29.7 GW.
Once that hits the balance sheets, strong solar companies will start to rise once again. I'm looking at JA Solar (NASDAQ: JASO) on the module side and MEMC (NYSE: WFR) on the silicon side.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shares fell from $26 to $8 in 2000... That's where solar is now. 
Call it like you see it,
Nick  Hodge Signature
Nick Hodge
follow basic@nickchodge on Twitter
Nick is an editor of Energy & Capital and the Investment Director of the thousands-strong stock advisory, Early Advantage. Co-author of the best-selling book Investing in Renewable Energy: Making Money on Green Chip Stocks, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world. For more on Nick, take a look at his editor's page.
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This email was sent to jorgeus.george@gmail.com . You can manage your subscription and get our privacy policy here.
Energy and Capital, Copyright © 2012, Angel Publishing LLC, 1012 Morton St, Baltimore, MD 21201. All rights reserved. No statement or expression of opinion, or any other matter herein, directly or indirectly, is an offer or the solicitation of an offer to buy or sell the securities or financial instruments mentioned. While we believe the sources of information to be reliable, we in no way represent or guarantee the accuracy of the statements made herein. Energy and Capital does not provide individual investment counseling, act as an investment advisor, or individually advocate the purchase or sale of any security or investment. Neither the publisher nor the editors are registered investment advisors. Subscribers should not view this publication as offering personalized legal or investment counseling. Investments recommended in this publication should be made only after consulting with your investment advisor and only after reviewing the prospectus or financial statements of the company in question. Unauthorized reproduction of this newsletter or its contents by Xerography, facsimile, or any other means is illegal and punishable by law.
Please note: It is not our intention to send email to anyone who doesn't want it. If you're not sure why you're getting this e-letter, or no longer wish to receive it, get more info here, including our privacy policy and information on how to manage your subscription.