I like to brainstorm investment ideas, and I always end up with these two in the pile.
I’ve always liked solar power, as I think it’s the simplest form of free energy. I did a partial post about Austin’s solar incentives a while ago. It explains how Austin will write checks up to $5,000/yr for individual households and $100,000/yr for commercial real estate to utilize solar energy. Not to mention the mass amounts of money saved on electric bills.
The Austin Convention Center has solar panels on one face of the building….
….and they don’t look half bad.
I did some research a while back, and Evergreen Solar (ESLR) seems to be a big, publicly traded player in the solar market. I also want to find some other contestants in the solar game.
I already bought and sold ESLR a few days ago, selling because high oil prices are drawing attention to alternative energy companies. I plan on buying and holding the company again when the price goes down a bit.
Another technology I REALLY like is physical media cards.
They can often be boiled in water, survive a plane crash and hold a lot of information. They are the size of postage stamps and can currently hold 4+ gigs, and within two years that number will go up exponentially.
They have no moving parts and require no maintenance or special care-taking. This is the perfect technology for the new, fast and small devices to come. I’m thinking SanDisk (SNDK) will be the biggest player in this market. I’ve bought and sold SanDisk stock in the past with success, hopefully a longterm hold will prove the same.