Fly Buy: $BX

I started a new position in BX.

Disclaimer: If you buy BX because of this post, your new pirate ship will take on water and sink to the bottom of the ocean. And, you may lose money.

I sold out of both positions.

New buys to follow.

I know the globally warmed winter has spoiled you with balmy weather. But tonight you are going to be reintroduced to a blast from the past, Old Man Winter. He lives in Boston, apparently, and he’s going to bury you alive.

By this time tomorrow, your towns will look like Pompeii. Instead of hot lava pouring down on your towns, incinerating everything in it, the exact opposite will occur.

EVERYBODY IS GOING TO FREEZE TO DEATH BY WAY OF THE ICICLE.

Grocery stores (SWY) will soon sport bare cupboards, thanks to the elimination of the North East highway system (GVA)–shut down, enshrouded by snow. Criminally insane (CXW) people will roam the streets in search of milk (DF), eggs (CALM) and bread (FLO). You will be forced to beat them about the head and chest to keep them out of your home, or perhaps shoot them in their heads (SWHC)– as the fight for survival hits a fevered pitch.

Do yourselves a favour and travel (Pii) to your local WFM or TFM to stockpile up on at least 6 months worth of canned goods (BGS), preferably organic (HAIN). Buy lots of rock salt (CMP) and plenty of shovels (LOW). While you’re at it, buy a few generators (GNRC), along with at least 10 containers (Justrite, privately held) of gasoline (WNR).

Brace yourselves, alongside a black mug filled with the blackest coffee (GMCR)– and some snacks (LNCE). Watch a few comedic films (NFLX) and spend some quality time with your loved ones (CHD, FHCO)– for your days on this earth are quickly drawing to an end (CSV).

Esteemed gentleman from the deep, deep south, Ragin Cajun, would like you to post charts on his new hobby called Chartpin.

The Chartpin, as far as I’m told, is a place where vagrants and gentlemen alike mingle over flaming barrels of garbage to discuss witchcraft. Shortly, this discussion will continue into other venues, such as Apple iPhone and Adroid apps, so that you, the people, can forgo actual reading, learning about companies and such, in exchange for hedonistic-reactionary lifestyles.

When you see a chart that makes geometric sense, mortgage the house and bet on it!

Such genius, such japery of the human intellect, can and will be found– exclusively– in the deepest, most southern, part of the interwebs: Chartpin.

We’re gonna raid the bears’ citadel tomorrow and pillage them, cut their heads off and make soup from their brains. It’s horror show trading for short sellers, no way out of the world’s dumbest companies in existence. They had the ball rolling downhill early, only to have their balls slices off late in the trading day.

I am buying housing related stocks on any dips. I started a new position in RH today, to offset Mrs. Fly’s spending sprees there. Just know and understand, the market is going higher and there is nothing you or your stupid friends can do about it.

Although I shed 0.4% today, “The Fly” is more powerful than ever, working diligently in his laboratory (you call it office), concocting new plans to separate himself from his newly minted neighbors. Spring renovation season nears and “The Fly” intends to have the jackhammers echo throughout the neighborhood, vexing everyone who has ears.

One more thing, I am looking forward to a decline in Japanese stocks. Let the goat-faced sellers denigrate the shares of HMC and SNE. We will snap them up and break their horns off.

I started a position in RH.

Disclaimer: If you buy RH because of this post penis will be castrated. And, you may lose money.

In the first part of this post, I highlighted industries that have underperformed the SPY over the last 12 months. What I am looking for is the next housing sector or the next solar surge, but in something that is currently being discarded. I put together a watchlist consisting of one stock per industry for all of the underperforming industries that was highlighted before.

What you want to look for is a total sector turn around, not industry outlier. You don’t want to get lucky with one stock that magically outperforms all others. That’s a very hard trade. The easier trade is to buy into a sector that is undergoing revival. Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to time fundamental turn arounds by looking at the numbers. However, you can act upon technical improvement and cross your fingers for the fundies to catch up later.

Here is the watchlist.

If you start to see outperformance in any of these names, investigate further into their respective sectors and see if a high tide is prepping up all boats. Members of The PPT can track this watchlist here.

I’ll get to stocks later, but I wanted to mention this first. If you recall, in 2011 a top secret drone was “captured” inside of Iran by the people with towels wrapped around their heads. Instead of having the drone destroyed, which is always the preferred course of action during situations like this, Obama elected to let the Iranians have the drone. There is no two ways about it.

Well, BEHOLD (try not to get too mad)

Iran has long claimed it managed to reverse-engineer the RQ-170 Sentinel, seized in December 2011 after it entered Iranian airspace from its eastern border with Afghanistan, and that it’s capable of launching its own production line for the unmanned aircraft.

After initially saying only that a drone had been lost near the Afghan-Iran border, American officials eventually confirmed the Sentinel had been monitoring Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. Washington asked for it back but Iran refused, and instead released photos of Iranian officials studying the aircraft.

The video aired late on Wednesday on Iranian TV shows an aerial view of an airport and a city, said to be a US drone base and Kandahar, Afghanistan. The TV also showed images purported to be the Sentinel landing at a base in eastern Iran but it was unclear if that footage meant to depict the moment of the drone’s seizure.

In addition, the TV also showed images of an Iranian helicopter transporting the drone, as well as its disassembled parts being carried on a trailer.

In another part of the video, the chief of the Revolutionary Guard’s airspace division, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said that only after capturing the drone, Iran realised it “belongs to the CIA.”

“We were able to definitively access the data of the drone, once we brought it down,” said Gen Hajizadeh.

He described the Sentinel’s capture as a huge scoop for Iran, saying that at the time, Tehran did not rule out a possible punitive US air strike over the drone.

Iranian officials have accused the US of stepping up its espionage activities against Iran as part of intensified Western efforts to force Tehran to abandon its uranium enrichment programme, a key aspect of its disputed nuclear programme. The US and its allies suspect Iran may be trying to develop atomic weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

In an attempt to embarrass Washington, Iran has claimed to have captured several American drones, most recently in December, when Tehran said it seized a Boeing-designed ScanEagle drone – a less sophisticated aircraft – after it entered Iranian airspace over the Persian Gulf.

US officials said there was no evidence that the latest claims were true.

How generous of our government to bestow space aged technology to people who would love nothing more than to stick a few nu-ku-lar devices inside of our Christmas trees.

I am not interested in buying beaten down sectors right now. Frankly, if XYZ isn’t going up in this market, it isn’t worth my time. But these industries of vast underpermance should be monitored and considered, only after they’ve started to turn the corner.

Deep in the bowels of iBC, I have a sector correlation tool, which isn’t for public consumption, that compares 194 industries to the SPY over a number of time frames. What you want to do is track the best stock per sector and wait for the turn. I don’t know if there is another massive sector turn around to be had, similar to housing mid 2011, but you never know.

Here are the industries that have underperformed the SPY over the past 12 months.

It’s clear to me that commodities have been the big underperformers. Steel, aluminum, gold, silver and oil have markedly underperformed the S&P over the past 12 months. In the next post, I will provide a consolidated watchlist, encompassing stocks from each industry mentioned above.

Your new Energy Boss, Ernest Moniz, is going to save the planet, one giant nuclear power plant at a time

News just broke that Obama is going to appoint MIT physicist, Ernest Moniz, as new energy secretary. He’s always been a nuclear bull, due to his global warming beliefs. Here is an article he wrote, post-Fukushima–still a flagrant, arch fiend, nuke joneser.

This essay is quite different from what I would have written pre-Fukushima but it’s pretty hard at the moment to think about anything nuclear from a different reference point. Fukushima has reopened the global discussion about the future of nuclear power. Several factors had led many countries to consider expanding their nuclear capacity, reversing phaseouts or initiating new nuclear programs. These include a very good safety and reliability record for the last decades, increasing concern about the risks of climate change and a concomitant recognition that enormous amounts of additional electric generating capacity will be needed without increasing greenhouse gas and other polluting emissions. Exactly how the new debate will end will remain unclear for some time, as the events and responses in Japan are investigated and understood fully, and as safety systems, operating procedures, regulatory oversight, emergency response plans and spent fuel management are reexamined for currently operating reactors.

Nevertheless, some outcomes are a good bet: the cost of doing business at nuclear reactors will go up; and the expected relicensing of forty-year-old nuclear plants for another twenty years of operation will be given a hard look. Indeed even the license extensions already granted for the majority of the 104 plants operating in the U.S. might be revisited. These plants, like those at Fukushima, rely to a large extent on active safety systems in case of accidents or natural disasters.

The consequences of such outcomes could be great. New nuclear power plant construction is already challenged by high capital costs, and increased capital and operating costs could be the last straw for many projects. If the anticipated life extensions are not realized to any appreciable degree, we will be faced with replacing tens of thousands of Megawatts of non-emitting generation. For the U.S., this is not an immediate problem since the end of the original forty-year reactor operating periods will not be reached for most plants for a while, and we have both substantially underutilized natural gas generation and lots of natural gas. Natural gas does have emissions, but far less than coal, and will serve as a bridge to a very low emissions future. However, the challenge of developing and demonstrating “no-emissions” options for 2020 and beyond is an immediate challenge, given the significant timeline from R&D to regulatory approval to market. Next generation nuclear plants with advanced passive safety systems are among those options, including small modular reactors (SMRs).

SMRs come in a variety of proposed forms, some based on the same underlying light water reactor (LWR) technology that is used in almost all nuclear plants today, while others are based on gas or metal cooled designs. They range in size from ten to three hundred megawatts. None have been through a licensing procedure at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and this is a time consuming process for any new nuclear technology — especially those that are farther away from the NRC’s established experience and procedures.

A major advantage of SMRs is that their small size compared with LWRs (whose size is typically 1,000 Megawatts and now going up to 1,600 Megawatts) means that the total capital cost is more in the billion dollar range rather than a significant multiple of that. Capacity can be built up with smaller bites, and this may lead to more favorable financing terms — a major consideration for high capital cost projects that take years to license and build. Still, the SMR must come in with a cost that is also competitive with LWRs on a unit basis; that is, the cost per installed Megawatt must be comparable or less. The LWRs have been driven to larger and larger size in order to realize economies of scale. The SMRs may be able to defeat this logic by having factory construction of the SMR or at least of its major components, presumably with economies of manufacturing, the ability to train and retain a skilled workforce at manufacturing locations, quality assurance, continuous improvement and only fairly simple construction on-site. The catch-22 is that the economies of manufacture will presumably be realizable only if there is a sufficiently reliable stream of orders to keep the manufacturing lines busy, and this in turn is unlikely unless the large number of designs is winnowed down fairly early in the game.

A 2020 SMR option will be available only if we start now, and even then it will be tight. Prior to Fukushima, the Obama administration submitted to the Congress a proposed 2012 budget that would greatly enhance the level of activity in bringing SMRs to market. LWR-based technology options would be advanced towards licensing, and other SMR technologies would be supported for the remaining R&D needed to have them follow in the licensing queue. The program is modest but sensible. Obviously the Federal budget deficit makes it difficult to start any new programs, but a hiatus in creating new clean energy options — be it nuclear SMRs or renewables or advanced batteries — will have us looking back in ten years lamenting the lack of a technology portfolio needed to meet our energy and environmental needs economically or to compete in the global market. Let’s get on with it.

Source

Nuclear stocks of note are CCJ, DNN, LTBR, NLR (etf), USU, URZ, URRE, URG, URA (etf), UEC, ES, GVP, PESI.

If solar stocks can triple in price, I see no reason why uranium, nu-ku-lar, can’t have a brainless run on some positive sentiment. Hell, the coal country rejoiced over Romney poll data for a solid 6 months.