I wrote about oil refiners – and the phenomenal performance of their stocks – on Monday. Today I'm writing about another energy sector that has been hot the last few weeks; namely, solar stocks.
Let's take First Solar (Nasdaq:FSLR), for example. Here's a stock that's gone from $70/share 6 months ago to $40/share 1 month ago, and now almost back to $60.
FSLR's all-time high is over $300, back in the summer of 2008. The stock spent the rest of '08 crashing, but then stabilized until February 2011, when FSLR peaked around $175 before crashing all the way to $12 in May 2012 (see chart from Yahoo! Finance, below). From that low point, FSLR enjoyed a nice, even, steady uptrend for the next 2 years. On June 20, 2014, when oil peaked at just above $107/barrel, FSLR was trading around $70 per share. FSLR's $30 haircut from June 2014 – January 2015 almost perfectly coincided with oil's big decline. Solar investors, of course, understand that solar becomes a more attractive energy alternative when oil prices are high, and vice versa. Continue reading "Solar Stocks Heat Up"