Think of this as Volume 18, Number 32 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.
While I have made some reputation as a technology journalist since 1982, I was actually trained as a general financial journalist, and spent my first few years in the field as a generalist. (The picture is of me and my best friend. Liked her so much I married her on December 23, 1977. I'm a buy-and-hold kind of guy.)
I was fortunate, it turned out, to be canned by ZDNet at the end of 2010. The tech journalism business, it turned out, was dying. Today they just want pretty young faces to cover devices, because there's nothing to learn. They want some programmers to cover cloud, because cloud is complicated. But very, very few people want to read about the details in cloud.
My journey went first to Renewableenergyworld.com, which it turned out wasn't interested in paying anyone for anything. Then another writer suggested I try SeekingAlpha.com, which he said was paying a penny a page view for financial views. I did, and a year later TheStreet contacted me. I've been with them ever since.
But am I any good at what I do? This week I took a look at some of my early work there to find out.
Most of my early stuff at TheStreet was, quite naturally, focused on tech. One of my first breaks beyond it came on May 14, when I suggested that regional banks would make better investments than the bigger banks, like JP Morgan Chase. JPM. That turned out to be a good call.
But not all my calls were right. In May 2012 I dumped heavily on Oracle, when it was selling near $27/share. It's currently at $40. I dumped on Amazon the same month, and it zoomed. When I turned bullish, this year, it went down. Some of my early calls were downright ridiculous – I called for Apple to buy Facebook and make Zuckerberg its next CEO in June. But what if they had?
Looking back, I'm amazed TheStreet put up with me. I called for a floor price on energy, in order to build infrastructure and make investments in renewables. When Marissa Mayer was hired as CEO of Yahoo, I predicted she would take the company back to its roots in technology – instead she made it a media play.
A turning point came at the end of June, when I made a call to buy health insurance stocks like United Healthcare, whose symbol is UNH. Since then the stock has gone from $60/share to $80, and has continued to pay out dividends worth about $2.40/share, a total yield of 4% cash if you've stayed in. I was early in my praise of Virginia Rometty at IBM, but the shares have not moved an inch since then – although they've paid out over $8/share in dividends. On the other hand I was very bearish on Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, and she's done well for stockholders because the company was so beaten-down when she came on board.
As I gained my sea legs, I started hedging my bets. I was speculative on Apollo Education, owners of the University of Phoenix, in July of 2012, and those who took me up on it have lost money. I didn't, and haven't. But the more important point – that the for-profit sector's use of technology represented a grave threat to the way higher education is conducted in this country – remains valid.
Overall, what I've found in looking at my early stuff on TheStreet is that I remain better at seeing over the next hill than what's right in front of me. I have no idea what stocks are going to do tomorrow or next week or next month, but over a year or two I'm usually right on the trend, even if the companies I pick as winners aren't those that actually win.
Of course it's pretty easy to look smart in today's market. When I first joined TheStreet the S&P 500 – the average you really need to watch because it's broadly-based and reflects the market rather than just who's hot now – was bouncing around the 1,400 level. Today it's at 1,940 – a gain of nearly 40% in two years. The right advice, for my portfolio and yours, would have been to buy the market and ignore the noise, even the noises I make.
My current view is simple. We're in an energy decade, like the 1970s, but this time it's driven by U.S. technology rather than our inability to deal with Arab Sheikhs. That's where the growth is. But while most people look at this in terms of fracked oil and gas, I think it's the technology, not the product, that's the point, my friends. The immense improvements we've had in harvesting wind and solar energy are just the start of something bigger and more important than fracking. Solar won't really need tax breaks when they expire in September, 2016, although they should be extended in order to accelerate growth.
What we're doing is moving from a time of energy scarcity, an economy in which oil has replaced the dollar as the global currency of choice, into a time of energy abundance. Once renewable abundance becomes obvious, then we're heading into another recession, but it will be relatively brief, and followed by a true golden age of technology, as things like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, and all the other miracles now churning out of universities and research centers is finally turned into profitable products.
Today belongs to energy, tomorrow belongs to technology. Today belongs to us, tomorrow belongs to our children. And theirs will not be the age of failure now predicted, but a golden time. I wish I could be there.
