Green Investing A Guide To Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks by Jack Uldrich

Green Investing A Guide To Making Money Through Environment-Friendly Stocks by Jack Uldrich is a guide to companies that have alternative energy products.

The first part of the book is about how you need to do your due diligence on stocks. Jack Uldrich warns you against investing in companies that have not yet fully developeda working product that is on the market. Doing this can be extremely risky. I personally lost money on Finavera because of a failed test of their wave buoy energy technology. Unfinished and untested products are a very high risk. Many companies make promises on undeveloped products.

Due diligence is the process of checking companies to see if they are safe to invest in. Thismeans looking at the finances, management, products, marketing, human resources, and everyaspect of the company which you can get your hands on. Do your due diligence when investing.

Jack Uldrich correctly points out that over half of alternative energy investments are occurringin Fortune 500 companies that are doing a variety of different things. Archer Daniels Midland is invested in ethanol, General Electric bought Enron's wind business and made it profitable, Goldman Sachs is investedin Horizon Wind Energies and Sun Edison a solar company. Although, it is not described in the book,Bank of America is working on building the most environmentally friendly office building in the world.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Tower_(New_York)

There is tremendous interest in clean technology. It is not just a passing trend. In the chapter on Fortune 500 companies and each proceeding chapter there are brief two page summaries of major companiesthat are invested in alternative energy and energy conservation. Many, but not all of the companies arepublicly traded companies. They are not just in the United States.
The chapters cover biofuels, solar, wind energy,alternative alternative energies, and energy conservation. Alternative alternative energies covers geothermal, wave power, fuel cells, and clean coal.

The book misses the boatwhen it comes to waste to energy conversion. There is nothing on Startech, a company developing a plasmafurnace for garbage http://www.startech.net/faqs.html, or landfill gasification. There is a little bit onanimal waste to biofuel in the chapter on biofuels. I don't think of clean coal as an alternative energysource. It is more of an attempt to clean up a very dirty source of power.

In each chapter, you get summaries of a variety of companies. I found two very interesting companies, Ormat Technologies for geothermal power and FPL Florida Power and Light (the nations largest producer of wind energy). I found in general like most books that advise about stocks, the book tended to be more bullish than bearish in stock opinions. This can be quite dangerous. Most companies are a tremendous risk to invest in. I am not giving any recommendations on investing other than saying it is risky. But, crossingthe street is risky.

This book is very to easy read. It is a general introduction to the subject. If you want to learn the basics of alternative energy investing this book is useful. The summaries are too simple to rely on them for making complete investment choices. I would look at them as snapshots or introductions to companies which you can do research on. The book is written in 2008, so most of the company information is still fairly recent. The book is not very long. The copy I read was a paperback. It is light and easy to carry around so it might make a nice subway read, or a read on an airport flight. I like the design of the book.