The headline “With record gas prices, time to invest in bicycle stocks?” certainly caught my eye.
Unless you suffer from insomnia, don’t bother reading the article, although it’s too short to actually put anyone to sleep. As the price of crude steadily increases, Giant and Merida have both seen their share prices go up. While this is good for them, it falls into the category of “so what?” for cyclists.
And Elizabeth Lin, who rates stocks for Deutsche Bank in Taipei, was quoted as saying “Fuel prices are a catalyst for demand, but now it’s become cool to own a bike”.
Sorry Liz, but long before gas prices started to suck, bikes were cool. And owning more than one was even cooler. This was before they were a commodity, or a novelty, or something people bought because it was too expensive to drive their car 10 blocks to the store.
There are plenty of people who choose to live car-free, yet they are paying the price for motorist’s (not just the US, but China and India as well) consumption in the form of higher food costs, as well as increasing prices of other consumer goods. And they don’t see this as a trend, either. It’s a lifestyle. They’ll live in blissful ignorance of stock prices, and just keep pedaling.
Rather than put in that buy order with your broker, why not put a buy order in with your LBS instead? That would make sense instead of dollars.
[This post is dedicated to a certain Portland cyclist that’s rockin’ it car-free in a big way]
As the demand for bikes goes up, the price will also go up. But we’ll also see more players entering the market, e.g. all of the local builders that seem to be popping up all over.