There is little down that one day Hydrogen will be the fuel of the world economy. However anyone alive today is unlikely to see it.
There is magic is fuel cells, even the electrochemistry of them is almost mystically pure. What is more magical than a car with an exhaust of pure water.
However fuel cells have all the pieces of a classic stock mania and they always end in tears.
You might say the recent move in fuelcell stocks is amazing and even shocking but it is just another stock bubble.
Stock bubble in the bipolar US equities markets are in the short run a blessing but in the long run a curse.
When stock manias begin, they suck in a bandwagon of novice investors who’s churning and burning feeds the financial ovens of Wall Street. Wall street in legendary for its short termism, so the fact that most of these potential long term customers are ruined in short order forever if of no concern to them. To those new traders the impact is traumatic.
The privations of single stock or sectorial bubbles, drastically suppresses the long term size of the stock market, keeping participation niche. Consequentially all the positive outcomes that a broader participation in investing is equities would deliver, is lost.
The workers don’t end up owning the means of production by investing in the stock market because they get suckered into bubble stocks lose their shirt and never come back. Those wicked post-capitalists win again.
So no sooner had the baton of narrative driven stock mania was passed from Apple to Tesla, then poom up goes the hydrogen bubble.
Ballard (Nasdaq:BLDP), Plug Power (Nasdaq:PLUG) and Fuel cell energy Fcel (Nasdaq:FCEL), the list goes on, all have had massive rises and there charts tell you all you need to know about the risk of getting your fingers burnt.
Here they are:
Ballard
Plug Power
Fuel Cell energy
Now this of course should be a clarion call to all you traders who want to ride these broncos up and down. Good luck to you. But to beginners I say, save your money and your nerve endings and look away.
This is what happened to Ballard last time the markets were going manic.
This is the kind of ride you can expect again.
Gold fingers are back.
It is hard for people in the US and most of Europe to understand government corruption.
Here some nice favours often ends up putting a public servant in jail. Outside this ivory tower many countries are little more than family businesses or power structure built to pillage a country.
Inefficient self serving government is one thing, but when the state is there to steal the assets of the country the dynamic is a world away.
I don’t say this to troll the US tin-foil wearing extreme libertarians who believe the US Government is the spawn of Satan, but to point out a key investing signal.
I bought Gold recently because technically the charts said “gold is going up.”
I didn’t know why.
However someone did.
Those someones were most likely in Russia.
They knew they were going to get nasty over Ukraine so they bought gold.
Why wouldn’t they?
Of course you would think that was wrong, but you have to remember a place like Russia has at best a very sketchy concept of the rule of law and that faint grey doddle gets even fainter the higher up you go in the power structure.
East European apparatchiks steal billions. It’s the norm. It would be considered almost unbelievable if a powerful person was up to his ears in the sort of thing that would have you thrown in the pen forever in the US.
So consequentially you can look to gold and Oil as a forward indicator of any global political problem where certain players have no qualms in front running their own actions.
So right now, if gold is tell us anything, things aren’t improving in the Ukraine/Russia incident.
As Gold rises so will the escalation of the “conflict” rise. Sharp and or unexpected moves will be followed by news, so don’t expect to have this the other way around.
Yet the important variable to consider is just the very corruption that is driving gold before the news.
Russia and for that matter Ukraine are run by kleptocrats whose billions are salted away all over the world. While they maybe sore from being fleeced in both Iceland and Cyprus they still have old fashion fortunes stashed away, the looted wealth of a once superpower, in international locations from one end of the globe to another.
A really serious conflict would wipe these fortunes out.
As such unless something exceptional were to happen, Putin cannot afford to cross too many lines.
If he does property prices in London, New York, other Russian playgrounds and tax havens around the world will plummet and Gold will go ballistic.
Gold will go ballistic first before the bad news hit.
But Russians aren’t that stupid. Or at least we can hope they aren’t. They have everything to lose, at least the hard “earnt” wealth and lifestyles.