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Monthly Archives: September 2009

STEC: Today’s Leading Data Storage Stock

September 18, 2009
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STEC: Today’s Leading Data Storage Stock

Sticking with the data storage theme from yesterday, my investment recommendation today is STEC, Inc., (STEC), a young company that’s making inroads into the industry with revolutionary new products.  These products, in short, are solid-state drives, like flash memory (which used in iPods and other small portable devices) but in this case designed for the enterprise market.  It’s still early–next year STEC may ship 200,000 to 300,000 drives, which is tiny compared to the 30 million hard disks that will be shipped–but the trend is under way. On August 31, editor Michael Cintolo wrote, “We’ve always said that the...

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The Rise and Fall of EMC Corporation

September 17, 2009
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The Rise and Fall of EMC Corporation

I’m a great believer in the adage that although history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes.  So today I want to review the story of the rise and fall of EMC … and see if we can learn something from it. The story starts in 1936 when a boy named Richard Egan was born to an Irish family in Dorchester, a working-class Boston neighborhood. He enlisted in the Marines at 17, just as the Korean War was winding down, and learned to fly helicopters. He then returned to Boston, and graduated from Northeastern University in 1961 with a degree in...

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TLVT: A Stock Pick of a Little Known Company

September 16, 2009
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TLVT: A Stock Pick of a Little Known Company

Now consider how much of that Green energy potential we’re tapping. Of the 100 quadrillion barrels of oil-equivalent energy the United States consumes each year, 85% comes from fossil fuels, 8% from nuclear power, 3% from biomass (primarily wood burning) and 2.5% from existing hydroelectric, like the Hoover Dam (there are no more large scale hydroelectric projects planned for the U.S. and likely never will be, due to environmental concerns). That’s 98.5%. The remainder, just 1.5% now comes from solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, tidal and other still developing alternate energies combined. And yet having just scratched the surface of...

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America’s Astonishing Renewable Energy Potential

September 15, 2009
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America’s Astonishing Renewable Energy Potential

There are tremendous alternative energy sources here in the U.S. to replace that diminishing oil supply. Quite simply, the U.S. is its own Green power Saudi Arabia. Here’s one example. The state of North Dakota alone is capable of producing 25% of America’s energy needs from wind power, provided there are enough transmission lines and the locals don’t mind wall-to-wall turbines. But drop environmental concerns, land use concerns and ignore areas where wind is consistently below 14 miles per hour, and North Dakota still has the potential to produce 1,210 billion kilowatt hours of wind energy a year, enough...

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How Significant is BP’s Gulf Oil Discovery?

September 14, 2009
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How Significant is BP’s Gulf Oil Discovery?

This month started with big news from oil company BP, which said it found an oil field deep below the Gulf of Mexico that may hold three billion barrels of oil. That’s a lot of oil–pull all of it out of the ground and it meets nearly three years of global oil needs. Realistically, though, much less than that is likely recoverable, perhaps as little as 10% or as much as 50%. We won’t know until BP tries. The find is significant given the fact that for many years the Gulf was considered barren of truly large oil fields,...

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