mohawk

GW Pharma is a company doing clinical trials, and i think Canadian licenced producers of cannabis are doing trials as well (though i don't know how many are about cancer/anti-tumoral activity).

Here's a long list of research papers on cannabinoids:

http://www.cannabis-med.org/studies/study.php

Comment · 9 years ago

I'm happy to hear uranium will last for a long time, gives us a good alternative if the sun ever stopped shining (e.g. massive volcano or asteroid). But it doesn't really change the economics.

China's newly installed solar capacity in 2016 was 34 GW and growing fast, they currently have 20 nuclear reactors under construction with a capacity of 20GW. So solar is quickly outpacing nuclear even in China, and the trend is in solar's favor.

The only saving grace that nuclear has at the moment is the lack of massive battery capacity. Electric cars are quickly changing that, and then it will be game over for nuclear.

I think that potential investors of nuclear reactors see this trend now as well, which is why interest in building new nuclear reactors in market-based economies is quickly fading (of course it depends on latitude at which point in time solar/wind dominance is reached). Quite substantial cost overruns are also typical for nuclear power plants, but rare for solar/wind.

Comment · 9 years ago

So may the best one of us win. My most profitable investments have been based on other people's myopia, and it is a far sweeter victory than scoring points in an online discussion forum.

Comment · 9 years ago

Ok, let's find some common ground: we agree current nuclear reactors "could be a lot better". With very finite uranium, coal, and oil deposits on earth these forms of energy generation are only a short-term solution. As an aside, it would also be great to save those energy supplies for a dark and rainy day.

My prediction is based on Econ 101: the cheapest solution will win.

Nuclear reactors (and coal plants) are long-term investment projects with payback over decades. If you're close to the equator, it doesn't even make sense today. And the increasing cost differential between solar and nuclear/coal will mean that zone is expanding towards the poles.

I'm sorry if you're financially or intellectually invested in nuclear, but that's what i think will happen.

Comment · 9 years ago

They will. I'm an investor, i like to make money, and i hate losing it. So i'm happy there's still someone else on the other side of the trade :-)

Comment · 9 years ago

Solar, wind & batteries will power the future. It is a question of when not if. All others will fade into oblivion. So long, and thanks for all the Joules.

Comment · 10 years ago

Recent large-scale research suggests dose-risk relationship holds at small doses for leukemia:

http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...

Comment · 10 years ago

Short advice: get a low-cost physically-replicating ETF covering a large part of the market (e.g. Vanguard) and dollar-cost average. This is the ultra-low-effort average returns approach.

Stock picking advice and understanding the economy:

I really recommend reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders which can be found on the Berkshire Hathaway website. They are written in a down-to-earth style and offer a panoramic view of investing, from accounting issues to competitive advantages to macroeconomics. You can also see Warren's investing style evolve and him deal with various issues throughout history, from high inflation to the dot-com boom. Warren boils down many issues into easily remembered sayings ("Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy", though the sayings themselves are probably as old as the stock market itself).

Find investments that have moats is one of Warren's guiding rules, i.e. business advantages that are hard to replicate.

Learn about accounting. You don't have to learn everything, but you should know about the things that will affect your valuation of an investment. Pension contributions, stock-option accounting, etc. Come up with your own metrics to compare companies in a sector to find out who is the most efficient etc.

You will have to find an edge, something that most other people don't know, otherwise you'll just follow the crowd. Things that aren't in fashion are great places to find bargains.

Understand how a discounted cash flow (DCF) calculation works. The important part in a DCF from the point of an investor is to look at how sensitive the results are with regard to changes in the input variables (because the risk-free interest rate and size/timing of future cash flows isn't known in advance).

Understand the effect of interest rates on asset prices (see DCF calculation).

Understand the debt cycle. We are at an interesting point in time, coming ever closer to our debt-carrying capacity.

Here is a nice video by Ray Dalio on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Some economists probably disagree with some things said there, but i think the gist of it is spot on.

Comment · 10 years ago

It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

Comment · 10 years ago

Alcohol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50tlF3kGbT4

Comment · 10 years ago

What exactly do you mean? It's too expensive? Legally impossible? No insurer would insure this?

It's a thought experiment to show what replacing wishful thinking with a tiny amount of objectivity would look like. OP was talking about expectation value of damages etc. Insurers are companies that deal with these sorts of things professionally.

The economic damages of Fukushima and Chernobyl are real and gigantic. It would be foolish to ignore them.

Comment · 10 years ago

It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.

Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.

And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.

Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.

[1] http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-heal...

Comment · 10 years ago

I would state it differently. Derivatives can be quite useful for the economy, because they allow people to offload risk, e.g. companies can hedge their commodity or exchange rate risks.

They become a problem in banks that have a lot of them ("weapons of financial mass destruction") because of their opacity on the balance sheet (DB has one line in their balance sheet for derivatives, ~ 500 billion Euros) and because banks offload their long-tail risks to their depositors and ultimately the taxpayer. The new bail-in rules mean that depositors in banks are essentially guaranteeing the bank's balance sheet. Think about that the next time you look at your bank account.