🚀 go-pugleaf

rburns@key.COM (Randy Burns) writes:

>The more I read the news in sci.physics.fusion, the more that I tend
>to think that _somebody_(my own favorite horses in this race are some
>of the small companies working on hot fusion) will come up with a 
>dramatically improved energy source sometime in the next 30 years.

>What investment strategies can folks suggest that would benefit 
>from events that dramatically decrease the costs of energy. 
>My ideal investment would be somethink like selling electrity futures
>-deliverable in some long horizon-short. Now, to the best of my knowledge
>there are no "pure" energy futures  Oil futures would come close, but 
>oil is used for lots of other things besides just producing energy, though
>I'd expect oil and coal prices to both drop rather dramatically  after
>some breakthrough in energy technology unless the non-energy uses of oil
>(i.e. making plastics and fabrics) expanded dramatically in response to
>cheaper energy prices.

>Thanks for your suggestions. Followups to misc.invest.

Shorting is probably a bad strategy for a long time frame,
and there are no long term puts.

So, the strategy should be to invest in industries that
will benefit from cheap energy.

For example, you might invest in Japanese companies,
since Japan must import a lot of oil from the Middle East.
If Japan could have its own independent energy, that would
make it much less vulnerable, increasing the economic
viability and security of the country.

But you might be right in the long term but the short-term
could be very rocky. For example, suppose you implemented
this strategy just before the Nikkei Index went from
32,000 to 16,000 ..

-Larry Watanabe watanabe@cs.uiuc.edu