"green energy" feasibility and investment opportunities

That’s only 12%. Doesn’t sound so bad compared to the rest of the market.

actually that’s much worse than the rest of the market.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4511513-equity-etf-flows-remain-positive-despite-largest-one-week-loss-since-march-2020

  • Equity funds and ETFs took a drubbing for the Refinitiv Lipper fund flows week ended Wednesday, May 11, 2022, with the average equity fund declining 8.65% for the flows week.
  • However, equity mutual fund and ETF investors only redeemed a net $8.6 billion this week, compared to $27.1 billion for the week ended March 25, 2020.
  • Year to date, equity funds (including ETFs) have taken in a relatively strong $68.6 billion considering the average equity fund is down 16.89% so far this year.

so the average equity fund has taken in money this year while the solar energy fund had a 12% net outflow

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Are you confusing outflows with performance? The fund’s performance appears to be a loss of around 20% YTD and 40% over the past 6 months.

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Yes, I think I was. I figured outflows are tied to performance – things are going down because money is being taken out. If there’s a net inflow, wouldn’t prices be going up?

Also the quote above is for equity funds, which is not the whole market. I can see ETFs having inflows while individual stocks are being sold / having outflows at a greater overall rate.

When you buy a stock, there’s a “net inflow” from your cash to your portfolio. Now ask why it doesn’t always go up :slight_smile:

Basically these fund flow stats reflect only a small part of the market, so it doesn’t matter as much as the broad market selloff.

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But that was kind-of my point – if the broad market is down, that means there was a broad market net outflow. S&P 500 is down 18.5% YTD. TAN (the Invesco Solar ETF) is only down 15% YTD (as of today). It’s not so bad.

No, that’s not true at all. Barring edge cases like secondary offerings or stock buybacks, the amount of shares is a constant. For every trade, someone buys and someone sells the same amount. There is no inflow or outflow of money - the same money bought as sold, and to each other. Today me and you can trade TSLA stock at $750. Tomorrow we can trade it back at $700. There’s been no net flow either day, or combined, yet the price moved.

These net flow stats are always on some subset of the market, like retail mutual fund flows, or ETF fund flows or whatever. That’s why they can be net positive or negative, but if retail is selling then institutional or hedge funds are buying, and v. versa. Make of that what you will, unclear it matters much.

Said another way, the stock price is set by the marginal trade, not by any huge amount of buying or selling. The market can go down (or up) on very little volume. Valuations are fleeting and just reflect what the few buyers and sellers who showed up today could agree on, nothing more or less. But you’re marking huge amounts of untraded holdings to their prices. Ask the NFT owners how that cuts both ways.

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Here’s a typical example on fund flows

All about the sellers and yet someone is buying. “us bond funds” I think here means retail owned mutual funds. Matters a lot if you get paid on AUM as a fund mgr, otherwise not so much.

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But it’s CA, so clearly if they’re running out of water to support their existing population, despite importing a huge amount from other western states, they should consider maybe letting in fewer illegal immigrants? Nah, that’s crazy talk.

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Absolutely! Although Joseph Robinette Biden is struggling politically, cutting back on the nation’s food supply is still preferable to stopping the poor, down-trodden, abused, ill, homeless, but positively hard working drug smugglers illegal immigrants.

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If you want to talk about how much the glorious Greenification might cost, we’ve got harsh words for you. Shut up til midterms or we’ll have social media censor you. This from the White House Climate Czar.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-censorship-phase-two-gina-mccarthy-social-media-biden-white-house-11655156191

Now pro­gres­sives are mov­ing to cen­sor­ship phase two, which is shut­ting down de­bate over cli­mate “so­lu­tions.” “Now it’s not so much deny­ing the prob­lem,” Ms. Mc­Carthy said in an Ax­ios in­ter­view last Thurs­day. “What the in­dus­try is now do­ing is seed­ing doubt about the costs as­so­ci­ated with [green en­ergy] and whether they work or not.”

Heaven forbid we talk about costs. How would we know if it’s worth it or if some other intervention would be a better alternative? When you follow Faith / The Science, you just know you’re right and the other tribe is wrong and also deplorable.

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Without a doubt the tech oligarchs will dutifully censor. At some point, this has to be a self limiting process. I have never used social media but even users will notice the echo chamber and move to something else?

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A good summary of an article about Europe’s and particularly Germany’s green energy dreams.

From the article, here’s a comparison of CO2 emissions of an electric battery car versus a fossil fuel car over its lifetime. The diesel car emits less
image

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/six-major-problems-with-green-transition.php

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from a new book on the topic of trying to reduce carbon emissions

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.

But who is going, willingly, to engineer decarbonization while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter? What will actually happen? The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.

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Yet another blockbuster case. Scotus is on a roll and I expect good things. If you thought the left was hysterical on guns and abortion, think how unhinged they will get if you challenge their main religion, global warning.

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more on the EPA decision:

So, the Supreme Court, which has moved far to the right with three new appointments by President [Donald] Trump (LOL), is taking a really sharp look at the administrative state and the rules that have governed it for a long time. Right now, we have a case before the court, West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, that’s really about the EPA’s authority to address climate change. And essentially, the court is very skeptical that Congress should be able to give administrative bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency authority to make big policy decisions — to decide, “OK, do we want to regulate just specific power plants? Or do we want to regulate the entire electric grid?” And the court thinks that those decisions constitutionally have to be made by Congress because that’s where the Constitution placed that power. And that is a fairly revolutionary doctrine. It’s dredging up some old demons that were first used back in the early New Deal to try to stop the New Deal and that since then have been considered long dead. But the Supreme Court is keen to revive them in an effort to constrain the powers of the federal government to regulate private businesses.

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That will be an interesting decision. I can understand how Congress needs to delegate this authority, they cannot be having a House vote for every little regulatory detail. But agencies like the EPA are pretty entrenched outside the reach of public accountability.

I’m just glad we seem to have a court that looks at and considers the merits of the case in front of them, rather than make decisions to appease whoever controls the bully pulpit.

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we also need to take into account the real politik of the situation. The bureaucrats who run the agencies and decide the policies are overwhelmingly left on the political spectrum. almost all live in Washington DC and this is the political make up of the city.

In District of Columbia County, DC 92.1% of the people voted Democrat in the last presidential election, 5.4% voted for the Republican Party, and the remaining 2.5% voted Independent. In the last Presidential election, District of Columbia county remained overwhelmingly Democratic, 92.1% to 5.4%.

and that is why the left will fight with all their resources to keep the decisions in the administrative state

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If there were any lingering doubt that climate-change policy is empty virtue-signaling, President Joe Biden dispelled it on Wednesday when he called on Congress to lift the federal gasoline tax. This desperate pitch is just the latest move in the White House’s increasingly panicked campaign to lower the cost of tanking up. Biden also asked state officials to pause their own local gasoline taxes.

But if climate change “poses an existential threat”—as a White House press release asserted in April 2021—then high gas prices are a boon, since they discourage, in the most efficient way possible, the consumption of fossil fuels. You don’t reduce demand by lowering the price of a good but by raising it.

Biden, in other words, is profoundly unserious about global warming. His counterparts in Europe are just as frivolous. Germany’s economy minister—hilariously, a Green Party member—announced on Sunday that Germany would be increasing the burning of coal, the fossil fuel with the greatest carbon emissions, in order to offset the rising cost of natural gas. The Dutch climate (yes, climate ) minister announced that the nation’s cabinet “has decided to immediately withdraw the restriction on production for coal-fired power stations.” Austria is reopening a coal power station that had been taken offline in the service of the climate agenda.

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That’s quite a jump to conclusions – neither is the policy virtue signaling nor should this action make one’s doubts about whether it is or isn’t disappear. Lifting the federal gas tax is a gimmick – it’s less than 4% of the total (average) price right now. It’s a little more than the difference between paying cash and credit (around here anyway). Nobody would notice even if it was implemented and passed on to the consumers (I hear gasoline sellers could just pocket it, nobody would ever know). It’s empathy signaling, if anything.