Who You Are

Results from our survey of readers.

Thanks to everyone who participated in our reader survey last week.  Our randomly selected winner has been notified by email, and the book has been mailed.  

Most valuable to us were the comments, and we appreciate the overwhelming encouragement from the vast majority of commenters.  But we’re realistic enough to know we can always improve the reader experience.

What You Said

Here are a few ideas I plan to act on:

• Tom, the stocks that you cover range from solid established companies, to pie in the sky speculative ones. I think it’s important to make those distinctions clear to your readers, like J P does.
• Tom could tell us even more often when he sells a stock or changes his opinion of one he has endorsed here in the past. (For this, readers should follow us on Twitter. I don’t always have time to post an article, but I’ll try to put some more alerts on Twitter.)
• A request – please do not start to charge for this service. (We don’t have any plans to charge.  Rather, we are looking for ideas to attract more readers and advertisers.)
• More info about stocks to avoid and why. (See Thursday’s article on shorting the least green large companies.)

And here are a few things we’re discussing as a team:

• More support for entry level investors (maybe a glossary of terms, or a quick guide to how and where to look for relevant company information, etc)
• it […] would be useful to have sector by sector analyses or a section on the technology behind each sector
• Being a beginning level investor, I sometimes am overwhelmed with the wealth of knowledge here. Sometimes a bit more simplification or layman’s terms would help. 
• Maybe a chart showing RE/EE stock performance over long periods.

We will not be able to implement all these quickly, but we hope you like what you see as we make changes over time.

Topics and Authors

We also understand from your comments that some readers would prefer if particular writers covered a wider range of topics, or feel that those writers have little useful left to say on a particular subject.  We hope that the author’s name in italics at the beginning of the article, along with the title of the article, will allow readers sufficient information to skip such topics and/or authors altogether.

Demographics

We asked several questions about you, and we’re pleased to know you’re a well educated, financially savvy group.  You’re also somewhat more mature than the standard internet crowd; I was surprised that we didn’t get any responses from readers under 21.  That’s perhaps a bit early to start worrying about stock market investments, but I thought we might have a few young readers because they almost universally understand the need to tackle climate change.

AltEnergyStocks.com readers are also very well educated, with a majority having at least a college education.  A good 10% of our readers also have investment management credentials, either a securities license or one of the well-recognized investment professional designations.

I consider it a mark of distinction that both individual investors and professional money managers find the site useful, including the 10% who manage over $1 million, with a few in the tens and hundreds of millions.  

A few respondents claimed to manage over $500 million, but I threw these in with the "no response" answers because 1) they all claimed to only manage money for themselves and 2) they actually gave us their contact information.  This seemed more characteristic of a reader with a sense of humor than a reader who might make it onto a "rich" list.

The other responses above $50M all came from people who manage money professionally.

Use of Your Information

A few readers were concerned about how we might use the mailing and email addresses we collected.  Our intent was only to use those for the contest, and to follow up with readers on their comments as necessary.  One reader suggested that we only collect emails, and ask the winner of the book for a mailing address after we had determined the winner.  This is a good suggestion, and we intend to follow that procedure in the future.

Once again, thanks for your time.  We’re still getting a few responses trickling in even though PollDaddy said they’d only give us 100 responses, so please give it a try if you’d like to give us some feedback or add your numbers to the statistical stew.

Tom Konrad, and the AltEnergyStocks.com Team