2010 Jan 17 - Sun
Short Interest, Solar, Lithium
Many commenters have been discussing Peak Oil, with Peak Oil being the fact that we've found all the easy
supplies of oil, most of which has been pumped, and that our supplies, regardless of type, are dwindling... the
peak has come and gone. To be more specific, the supply of oil, of which we only have a finite supply, is decreasing,
while world demand for oil is increasing. The first day of Economics 100 teaches us the supply / demand curve and the
effect on pricing. Oil prices can only go up, and up until the last dropped is supplied and consumed.
In the meantime, alternate sources of energy must be found to supply the world's unending requirement. For
sourcing some fraction of our energy needs, some are turning to the nearly non-ending supply of sunlight. One
way of converting sunlight into energy is through the utilization of solar panels. Solar panel technology
has improved recently, and has resulted in it becoming economically viable to generate electricity via these sunlight receptors.
A number of companies are in the business of producing solar panels. In a sideways fashion, I came across
TSL (Trinia Solar) yesterday. Someone had run a stock screener with the settings similar to:
- stocks with high put/call ratio
- minimum stock price of $10/share
- minimum put & call open interest of 10k contracts
- minimum average daily stock volume of 100k shares traded
- trading above its 20-day moving average
- near a 52 week high
TSL has risen briskly but has some pessimism from investors based upon puts easily outnumbering calls. If the
negative sentiment unwinds, it could rise further. Another area of measuring pessimism is through
monitoring short interest. The web size
Short Squeeze offers up information so one can see how many shares are sold sort for a
company. Short Interest can also be found within the Fundamental Record of the DTNIQ data stream.
In looking at TSL on Google today, Google shows that all similar solar stocks took a decline today. It turns out that
the German government will cut its solar financial incentive schem by 16 to 17 percent.
With a price correction like this, it might be interesting to look to getting into solar at this level. But the real moral
of the story is that a news service which tracks a portfolio's stock symbols is probably worth its weight in gold.
Moving along with the alternate energy theme, collected energy needs to be stored. Currently technology
appears to be focussing on Lithium as the mineral of choice. A common play appears to be WLC (Western Lithium). An
upcoming player as mentioned in Industrial Metals magazine might be GXY (Galaxy Resources).
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