Energy Storage: A Bloody Q3 is Creating a Great Buying Opportunity
Posted: 01 Oct 2011 08:04 AM PDT
John Petersen
Tom Lehrer is frequently credited with a quip that perfectly summarizes my feeling about the financial markets in the third quarter, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” During the quarter we were given box seats to classic political opera in two acts. Act One was set in Washington DC while Act Two moved to Europe so we could hear the same tortured songs of woe in a different language. We all know the opera has to end with the immensely popular “Kick the Can Chorus,” but we suspended disbelief, bought into the fear and held a massive liquidation sale. As a curtain call it looks like we’ve let our elected demagogues scare us into a new recession. Do you ever wonder if the system might work better if ballots included “None of the above” as an alternative and required the offices to remain vacant if nobody won a majority?
For the third quarter the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes were down an average of 13.1% and it was even uglier in energy storage where the best names in the business were beaten down by 35% to 50%. The following table summarizes the price performance of my tracking list for the year and the quarter ended September 30, 2011.