Today for our Friday pleasure I thought I’d look into another really tiny and illiquid stock — partly because lots of folks have forwarded questions about it to me, and partly because it’s hard to write about $20 million market cap companies without driving the shares crazy when I mention them on the free site.
So let’s jump right in, shall we?
The folks at Green Chip Stocks have a clever attention-getter for their new ad that teases an LED company — here’s how the letter starts:
“Edisons Evil Plan
“American hero Thomas Edison intentionally engineered a fatal flaw into the incandescent light bulb…
“It costs the U.S. $18 billion a year…
“And it can net you 14 to 18 times your money before the end of the year”
And there’s a nice old conspiracy theory that goes like this:
“And it wasn’t until the light bulb was completely developed that Edison’s true plan was revealed.
“Just seven years after he displayed his first incandescent light bulb, he built more than 132,000 power plants — the result of his ambitious filing of over 1,000 patents.
“Edison knew that the light bulb business would be robust. But he also knew that if he provided the power for these light bulbs, he could wet his beak on both ends. And that’s why he designed the light bulb to be inefficient…
“It was actually quite an ingenious master plan; one that made Edison an extremely wealthy man.
“The light bulb that Edison invented — basically the same one we use today — loses up to 98% of the energy that actually goes into powering it.
“In other words, only 2% of the power that gets to the light bulb is actually used to create light. The rest is simply wasted.”
The pitch is basically that Thomas Edison intentionally made the incandescent light bulb to be an energy hog that turns far more energy into unwanted heat than into necessary light … so that he could make more money by selling electricity. I have no idea whether or not there’s any truth to that, but it makes for a fun pitch.
And yes, incandescent light bulbs are horridly inefficient, which is why they’re too hot to touch … and why the easy bake oven was such a runaway success. How will tomorrow’s children ever bake a nasty little cake in ...