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Technology Stocks : FuelCell Energy - going green -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dwayne Hines who wrote (111)	6/13/2014 12:01:06 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 211

A prudent investor does more than gamble or speculate. That's because the probabilities of a loss are too great when the investor has insufficient information to make more than a guess about the outcome. Technical analysts use price and volume trends to draw inferences about short term movements, up or down. That's one way to make money, but not the way a long term investor would go about making a well formed decision. If you don't know enough about revenues, expenses, and earnings, not to mention assets and liabilities, you are forced to make some guesses, which could be dangerous to your wealth. Worse, if you don't know enough about management quality, then you are in a crap game, where, if the game is honest, you have a probability of 50–50 (i.e., 0.5) of being successful. That would certainly not satisfy me as an investor. What we know about FCEL is that it has been in the business for awhile, so it has some proven technology. We also know that generating electricity from hydrogen based fuel cells is, except in a few instances, more expensive than, say, relying on natural gas as a fuel. We also know that, in the interest of cleaning up the environment, there are certain subsidies in the form of tax deductions or credits, or in the form of carbon tax credits, that can make fuel cells attractive, especially in locations fraught with heavy doses of air pollution. And we also know that continued use of fossil fuel in general gets more expensive, either because the cost of finding new reserves keeps going up, or because the cost of modifying the fuel to burn cleaner keeps increasing, thereby making fuel cells and other alternative energy sources more competitive. But these are all long term trends, making it unlikely that a company with a history of losses, year after year after year, will suddenly become profitable. Or profitable enough to make it a worthwhile investment. And by that I mean the return on investment would have to be equal to or greater than another investment of equal or lower risk. We're not there yet, as far as I can see for FCEL. Art