Tuesday Aug 08, 2006

Big profits...No joke

Taipan Group's Dynamic Market Alert

--- Big profits… No joke
--- Clowns & Harlots: When Life Is a Beach

Prospering WITHOUT OIL!

The biggest winners on Wall Street over the next 3-5 years will be the small group of companies that successfully replace oil and energy.  I call them “Free Power Technologies”

The Tiny Companies Pioneering These “Free Power Technologies” Will Make You 30% Richer Each Year…For the Next Five Years 

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Big profits… No joke

by Andrew Snyder, BreakAway Investor

There is an old joke in the medical industry.  A guy walks into a doctor’s office and says to the doctor, “My arm hurts when I bend. Can you fix it?”

“Of course,” replies the doctor.  “Just stop bending it.”

It’s a lousy joke, but it proves a point.  Right now, America’s addiction to energy is hurting us.  The only way to get rid of the pain is to “stop bending it,” as the doctor would say. 

But even with gas prices averaging above $3 at the pump, Americans are using 140,000 barrels more of gasoline each day than we did last summer.  There is no quenching our thirst for more and more gasoline, no matter how high prices get.

We are bending our arm more than ever, no matter how much it hurts. 

Rising demand has set the energy industry on fire.  Smart investors have landed double- and even triple-digit gains by investing in the companies that feed our energy addiction. 

But as the oil industry heats up, so does its competition.  The alternative energy industry has handed investors the same kind of profits… if not bigger.

But are the gains sustainable, or is “green” energy nothing but a hippie’s pipe dream?

Thirty years ago, if you would have gone to an alternative energy convention, the parking lot would have been filled with brightly painted Volkswagen Micro-buses and the bike racks would have been filled end-to-end. Inside, the convention hall floor would have been a sea of tie-dye. 

Today, the parking lot would be packed with Lincolns and luxurious SUVs.  Inside, black and gray suits with only a sprinkling of ponytails would dominate your eye. This time, Wall Street would have the strongest showing. 

With so much serious attention and big money being put into the alternative energy industry, you would expect “green” power production to be up.  Wrong.  It’s down, even though alternative energy investments are up more than 60% over the last year.

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, 6.5% of the nation’s energy came from renewable sources in 1975.  Thirty years later, that figure has dropped to 6.1%.  That is not something to be proud of.

If we want to fully replace today’s high-priced gasoline with fuels like ethanol and biodiesel, we would have to increase production levels from current levels of 325,000 barrels per day to over 16.5 million barrels. It is a process that will require billions of dollars, if not trillions, and decades to accomplish.

With figures like that is alternative energy the ultimate growth industry?  Will biofuels eventually replace crude-based fuels?  Probably not, but alternative energy will most definitely get a bigger piece of the pie.

Researchers value America’s energy industry at more than $1.5 trillion annually.  With its 6% share of the market, alternative energy gets about $91.5 billion of that revenue.  Not a bad sum, but it will get bigger.

The goal of most state and federal legislators is to boost alternative energy to a 33% share of the energy market within the next decade.  It is a lofty goal and is likely unobtainable without some major economic pain. Simply trying to reach the goal is what will hand investors plenty of great opportunities.

As Congress tries to force “green” energy on the economy, they will do it with subsidies, tax increases and plenty of research grants.  If the market doesn’t naturally want alternative energy, Washington will up the ante until it does. 

Follow the money from Washington.  It will lead to profits.

At Volume Spike Alert, we are tracking a company that is at the epicenter of an alternative form of fuel production that has Washington drooling.  As I write, there are 10 bills floating around Capitol Hill that would hand this company a hefty subsidy.  If any of them pass, share price will soar.

At BreakAway Investor, I am recommending a company at the heart of the West Coast’s ethanol industry.  Because ethanol is so difficult and expensive to transport over long distances, this company has a distinct advantage with its California location.  The state’s government is one of the largest proponents of ethanol and alternative energy in the union.

Truly, there are dozens of great alternative energy plays out there.  If alternative energy usage bumps up to just 8% of overall energy consumption, it will give investors more than $10 billion in annual revenues. 

Alternative energy may never eclipse fossil fuels in our lifetime, but it is a viable source of energy that is here to stay.  It is a highly volatile sector, but over time, it will make investors plenty of money.  Short-term traders are already seeing big profits. 

I recently wrote a fully detailed outlook on America’s energy future.  If you don’t mind reading nearly two-dozen pages of facts and figures with handfuls of investing tips thrown in, check out the BreakAway Investor Web site and give the report a read.  It will be worth your time.

Enjoy your day.
   
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Clowns & Harlots: When Life Is a Beach

by Christopher Corbett

Every summer my wife’s extended family gathers in a rented beach house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina to celebrate family values, gorge on junk food, pine for days of yore, tell stories, get sunburned, peruse the works of Mary Higgins Clark and Clive Cussler, watch the same movies, eat more junk food and tell the same stories again.

After a week, they return home carrying six cubic feet of beach sand.
         
Since time immemorial (or at least as long as I’ve been a member of the family, which is starting to feel like the same thing), this annual migration takes place.  It’s a ritual that combines the best of a medieval pilgrimage with the highlights of the Bataan Death March, a side order of Family Feud and just a dash of Survivor: Borneo.
         
The fun begins with a 339.61-mile drive (I know every mile) that each year somehow takes longer.  This little jaunt on the nation’s most traffic-choked highways brings together elements of NASCAR with a soupcon of road rage.  The holidaymaker arrives feeling as if he’s had electroshock therapy.
        
Because there is no zoning on the Outer Banks (near as I can figure), every possible architectural oddity has been shoehorned onto postage stamp-size lots.  Here, an Alpine ski lodge fit for the Von Trapps.  Next door, a Moorish temple out of the Thousand and One Nights.  Across the street, a Mexican hacienda and several things propped up on stilts.  And as a reminder of the 1950s, the first beach house -- a grim pillbox that looks like something the Wehrmacht constructed on the Normandy coast.  All of these houses have been rented for a week by other families doing exactly the same thing.
         
After years of study, I have concluded that the problems of a week at the beach with extended family are, on a small scale, the problems of mankind.  It’s why the United Nations does not work.  It’s why the League of Nations failed miserably.  It’s why the Ten Commandments (a fine idea in theory) are largely ineffectual.  People are basically unfair and selfish -- and family only more so.  They want you to buy the Cheetos.  They want to eat the Cheetos.  That’s it in a nutshell.
        
Put any group of people in a rented beach house for a week -- even nuns, Buddhist monks, Quakers, vegans -- and you’ll have Lord of the Flies within 48 hours.  Women do all the work -- except that which can be subcontracted to the weaker males (me).  My wife, for instance, washes dishes, does laundry, vacuums, sweeps, cleans, fetches, totes, scrubs and scours from dawn to dusk.  She also prevents her nieces and nephews from drowning (she was a lifeguard). 

Meanwhile, the male members of the tribe engage in the traditional beach rituals -- trips to the Brew-Thru, injuring themselves with children’s toys, napping, playing solitary video games, discussing the musings of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly and making extra trips to the Brew-Thru.  These are patterns of behavior that any anthropologist would recognize from the Trobriand Islands to Nantucket.
         
Each year one family member plays paparazzi cameraman and films the entire proceedings.  There are said to be several hundred hours of these videos in a vault somewhere.  We may have pioneered reality television.  Our week at the beach was Road Rules with no rules.  The Real World, Survivor, and America’s Funniest Home Videos.  I think Chevy Chase made a movie about us.  We were the Osbournes (as in the British rocker Ozzy and family) before we knew there were Osbournes.
         
In general, normal life ceases to exist at the beach.  The noise level is medically unhealthy -- it’s like a sleep deprivation experiment.  Some member of the extended clan is always awake until 3 a.m.  And at dawn another member rises to begin making a racket.  Toilets are constantly being flushed.  All the televisions are going simultaneously.  Babies are crying.
         
To pass the time we play board games.  We watch the same movies year after year (Jaws is a favorite).  We play cards.  The children put on skits.  They impersonated me once.  It was me all right.  I was complaining and wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
        
The week in the Outer Banks is a special time for my wife’s family, reminding them of when they had servants.  Alas, now they have only one family retainer -- that would be me.  My days at the beach are equally divided between when I haul beach furniture, umbrellas, coolers, visors, Frisbees, boogie boards and a Tom Clancy novel weighing as much as a cinderblock, down to the beach -- a distance about the length of four football fields -- and when I haul those items back.  I look like Jerry Lewis in The Bellboy.  I walk 11 miles on an average day -- and three miles more on days when the temperature climbs into the 90s, requiring additional cold beverages.  The hotter it gets, the more stuff they want.
         
When it rains at the beach, the members of our company either peruse the works of Miss Higgins Clark or Mr. Cussler, or drive down to Kitty Hawk, to view the exhibit of aerial photographs – pre-Weather Channel stuff -- called “When Hurricanes Attack.”  The photographs document what happens when the wind blows 165 mph and you are stranded on a sand bar.  But I find that quite relaxing after a few days of beach bliss.

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