I arrived back in LA Monday afternoon and am headed back home late tonight. I’ve had calls and/or meetings with two of the most valuable companies on the planet, the biggest agencies on the planet, the biggest celebrities on the planet and I’ve got more today. Lots of insights, lots of ideas, lots of analysis to share with you guys tomorrow and Friday.

In fact, let’s plan on doing a Trading With Cody Live Q&A Chat all day tomorrow while the market is open in the Trading With Cody Chat Room.

I’ve also got a couple trades I want to do this morning before I hit the LA scene.

First, I’m going to trim about 10% of my Solar Edge for the first time since we bought it just over a year ago. The stock has more than doubled from our cost basis and has been in a strong rally mode for the last couple months. Just being prudent and taking some nice profits.

I’m also adding another second tranche of Verizon today, just buying about 1/4-sized position in Verizon common stock to continue to build this new position up a bit.

Here’s the note I sent out when I bought Solar Edge a year ago:

Trade Alert: Shining on two solar stocks

September 27, 2016 by Cody Willard

It looks to me like most solar stocks, at least the decent ones, are trying to bottom here. There has been a steady sell-off in everything solar-related for the last six months and that broad sell-off action is giving us some opportunities here to pick amongst the rubble for some stocks that could thrive in years ahead.

First, let’s review why solar.

The beautiful part of solar energy generation vs crude energy generation is the recurring nature of the source of the energy vs the depletion of the other. The sun shines over and over and over every year. Dinosaurs and ice ages won’t combine for to make new oil supplies on earth for at least another few millennia, so you can’t really consider carbon-based energy to be renewable in any real-time sense. So once you build a solar generation plant, the significant part of the spending to build such recurring revenue generating assets is over. Oil wells, shale oil wells and oil barges and coal mines and so on, all deplete over time and new investment to find new sources is a constant in the carbon-based energy business.

By its very nature then, solar and other renewable energy sources like wind, with their fixed investment and recurring revenue generation models are inherently more viable over the long-term than oil, coal or even plant-based energy sources like ethanol. You have to plant your corn fields and then harvest them and then process them into energy over and over every year forever, right?

Meanwhile, once built you just have to make sure your solar and wind generation plants are maintained but not much more than that. And even here,solar energy has an inherent long-term cost advantage over windenergy. Wind energy requires moving parts on the windmill and inside their motors. Any engineer will tell you that the more movement you have in your product, the more wear and tear and therefore the more costs you’ll have to maintain your product over time. Solar panels move to follow the sun by tilting slightly, but the source of their energy is light and heat, not movement. And that makes solar a better longer-term solution as a renewable source of energy than wind.

So looking out over the next ten to thirty years, I remain as bullish and excited about the upside potential in First Solar and other solar stocks as I have been since we moved into this sector after its bubble had popped and we were able to get into it while sentiment was low and stock prices collapsed. Indeed, we even nailed the popping of the alt-energy bubble by riding A123 and other alt-energy stocks into their bankruptcies as the crash finished itself up. Recall that when I turned bullish on the alt-energy sector, it was in the midst of a wave of bankruptcies in the sector and it just about marked the bottom. Recall that I’m expecting to see a rash of similar bankruptcies in the oil and carbon energy sector in the next year or three before we’ll see energy bottom.

Again though, I won’t be looking to invest in the cyclical carbon energy sector but do plan on continuing to invest in the Revolutionary solar energy sector for the long term.

And here’s the note I sent out about why I’m buying Verizon last week:

Trade Alert: Old school telecom or 5G killer?

October 5, 2017 by Cody Willard

In all my years as a technology and telecom and communications investor, I’ve never been a big fan of the major telcos — AT&T, Verizon, Cingular, SBC, Sprint, Worldcom, etc. There’s been a lot of reasons for my reticence in buying these old telcos, including each of them having had too much debt, too much competition, and the fact that most of their legacy business was built on old telecom technologies that Internet Protocol technologies have replaced over the last fifteen years.

But we’re here now, about to see the 5G Revolution hit. There is so much pent up demand for better wireless connectivity with much higher bandwidth that whoever delivers on the best and earlier roll out of 5G is likely to be squash all competitors and become a huge winner for many years to come. You all have heard me lament the lack of bandwidth when I’m live streaming on my app lately and I heard Neil Patrick Harris say the same thing on his live stream the other day — “When will these wireless providers get me the speed I need?”

The answer is those higher speeds are coming over the next year. Verizon has spent tens of billions of dollars expanding their backbone, buying wireless spectrum to run 5G and otherwise preparing to bet their company on 5G dominance.

I will say, it drives me crazy that Verizon’s been dinking around buying retrenching internet content companies like AOL and Yahoo, but on the other hand, I give them credit for not overpaying or chasing “hot” content companies of today. Frankly, I’d expect to see Verizon write down their AOL and Yahoo purchases entirely and/or spin them off and/or sell them for whatever they can get in the next two to three years. But clearly I think there is so much more potential upside from the company’s core competence of delivering connectivity to people, businesses and devices that I want to start a position in this stock today.

Verizon pays us a 5% dividend yield to just hold the stock and I think, frankly, the stock could double or more in the next three to five years if they really do end up dominating 5G in the US as I expect they will. If the company doesn’t dominate 5G in the US and/or in a broader stock market decline, the stock could drop below $40, I suppose. So there’s your risk/reward profile for this name.