Breaking Speculation: conservative investors are shorting solar stocks

Billionaire conservatives have done everything else, from spending millions attacking health reform, millions more attacking the president through their front groups, collaborated with right-wing media to punish the volt (american ingenuity) for being associated with GM (hence, associated with president Obama because he loaned them money).

Why wouldn’t they be shorting solar stocks too?

A bit of searching lead me to Wall Street’s Irrational, Dangerous Hatred of Solar Stocks.

For most of 2011, the stocks of solar power companies of all kinds, from providers of raw polysilicon to developers of finished utility-scale plants, have been taking a beating on world and U.S. stock markets, partly because solar has been the industry most singled out for attack by bearish short sellers.

Further along

Solar is hated in spite of being the fastest-growing energy sector in the U.S. (67% 2010 growth; 66% growth just in the first quarter of 2011) and in the world (70% 2010 growth), and also even though its shares trade at very low valuations already.

Does this sound like an investment opportunity?
It does to me also.
Hard to be sure which ones will survive, however.

And another highlight.

Meanwhile, on the electricity side, solar is quietly becoming competitive with the average grid price (especially in sunnier climates) and is rapidly getting cheaper still. “Price per watt of solar modules (not counting installation) [have] drop[ed] from $22 … in 1980 down to under $3 today,” according to Ramez Naam, in a great piece for Scientific American. And, as this trend continues, “in 2030, solar electricity is likely to cost half what coal electricity does today.

“Does Wall Street to some degree answer to the huge buckets of money represented by Big Oil? Yes.”
Conservative billionaires = koch brothers are oil billionaires and their company is one of america’s most offensive polluters.

And still further along, the author notes:

CNBC reported on-air that Arizona’s First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR ) , a Green Alpha holding, missed its first-quarter earnings, when in fact the company’s earnings had beaten expectations by 15%. The stock plunged 10%.

Since I’m not real energetic right now, I’m not looking far for corroboration, but the second search result from the great oracle google is this.
http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/progressiveinvestor.sample/id/105/sectionid/494

As a green investor, you are most likely acutely aware of how poorly most solar stocks have performed over the past several years, especially given the impressive rate of growth of the industry. What’s causing this disconnect? Is there something deeper going on that’s keeping solar stocks depressed?

Ok, the guy has my attention. I hope that he’ll come to a conclusion that vindicates my speculation in some small way. Talk politics guy. Yup, further vindication.

From a purely investment management point of view, it makes absolutely no sense to short stocks that are already ridiculously low – how much further down can they go? That leads me to believe the people putting short squeezes on these stocks have something other than a financial reason – and the only reason left is an ideological one.

Apparently CNBC did not issue a correction for their faulty reporting of that solar company mentioned above.

“By and large, Wall Street is run by hard core Republicans, who are very ideologically motivated to love oil and hate solar. ”

Yup, I thought so.
And the apparent motivation is summarized with “By shorting solar – by creating a culture where solar is hated – they can probably push its mass adoption out more years”

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