Pre 8 a.m. comments

My early bird comments this morning are on Clean Air Power (LON:CAP), which is a share I personally hold, and is currently the strongest performer in my portfolio. It's also the most speculative. I believe in adapting my investing style somewhat to market conditions, and when we're in a roaring bull market like this, then I'm prepared to be more flexible, and consider shares which are somewhere between blue sky and GARP (growth at reasonable price).

Clean Air Power looks a particularly interesting growth company, and is arguably still quite reasonably priced at a market cap of £19.5m (177m shares in issue, and a current mid-price of 11p).

Note the recent intra-day spike down to 5p, where a major shareholder inexplicably dumped £1m of shares at over 30% below the market price. This gave me an opportunity to double my stake at a buying price of 6p, which I happily did. I'd done my research and knew they had adequate cash resources, so it was a time to be bold, rather than hesitating and finding out the reason for the spike down.

They have burned cash of £50m to get here, and is a company which sells an innovative conversion kit for large road vehicles (e.g. HGVs) which allows them to run on dual-fuel, being a mixture of diesel and up to about 90% natural gas. I was amazed that this is even possible (since diesel engines are normally ruined if you put anything other than diesel in them), but apparently it is.

The diesel is used like a liquid spark plug apparently, to ignite the natural gas, and sophisticated software adjusts the mixture so that the engine always runs safely & without wear & tear. There are even claims that wear on the engine is reduced, since there are fewer abrasive chemicals in the spent natural gas fuel. More details are here on their website, I'm probably not explaining it well, especially at this time of the morning before my first cup of tea!

There is an increasingly large cost saving from running HGVs on natural gas, and the American market is the big one, with cheap shale gas increasing demand,and CAP are launching there in 2014. In the meantime the technology is real, and being installed in…

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