Comeback Milestone for Our Portfolio

I've lost a little perspective on what is in the public portfolio and what is my guarded investments, which I'm generally not averse to sharing, I only believe there are a few utilitarian reasons to run this column the way I have done it. It seems that Tesla and our...overly enthusiastic bet on Plug near its YTD peak have pinched the diversity of the public set, and with Tesla just now struggling back toward even against our 'cost basis,' the amount we paid originally for the shares we own, the numbers can't look good, though I can't even bear to look at the Bloomberg.com tracker I've built in their Wishlist widget.

You can understand my mixed relief and satisfaction then to see, not two weeks after I marked it, Plug Power stock finally drifting back up past $30. Now, $30 is nothing. It has only been drifting at $27, so it does not represent a significant gain except that, it had been drifting, but drifting pretty stubbornly in the $24-$28 range, without really even breaking $29, even intra-day, during the trading day. The same idiots who will tell you RBI don't matter will insist that the entire market is run by computers and trades are selected by AI based on algorithms that blah blah blah...

The market is run by money, and money exists to satisfy the needs of sentient animal beings. Those algorithms depend on judgements, evaluations and grades given by humans. Individual humans, acting in concert for a wide variety of reasons, are still more than capable of creating a market run. I could go on and on with the proofs, but the fact is that the market is a human expression, and it operates on human psychology. Billy Ray will always be the better trader than Louis, though the knowledge Louis earned the long way is also critical.

SO, $30. Matters more to you, reading it, doesn't it, than $29, even though that's technically the 'level' the stock has 'broken through,' as the churn and burn blogs are always roaring at me. I've used that term before too, without explanation, and my Dad insists that the tutorial tone works and should be held fast, so let me explain it, too. 'Churn and burn' is what any middleman wants to do to product, it is a natural effect, a tool, that cynical, lesser-talented money managers overuse to generate income for themselves without significantly increasing returns.

Not to go too deep and dark into the bitter psyche of an unpublished novelist, but the publishing industry has become highly dependent on a type of middlemen, literary agents, who may very well have the intellect and sales talent to move more risky and daring content, but have been contentedly aiming for consistent, barely profitable producers for many decades now. Churn and burn refers to the sort of baseball player who could hit 40 home runs and 40 doubles batting .218 in the majors, but toils away instead hitting .250 with 25 steals in the minors because he insists wrongheadedly on doing things 'the right way.' Churn and burn denotes a lack of imagination, a self-indulgent, mechanical pursuit of 'the method.'

But $30 represents both a fiscal and a psychological breakthrough that even the big oil nostalgiacs can't pretend is temporary. I have other things to write today, so I'll let it go, here, simply suffice it to say that, with other gains my investments have made over the last week, my current losses, which are still significant, nevertheless continue to mostly look like eventual winning middle-term plays.