Today, we have an interview with Oxford Club Engineering Strategist David Fessler. Dave is an electrical engineer who served as an executive of two successful tech firms before becoming an investment guru. His specialties include companies in the energy, infrastructure and technology sectors. Dave contributes to a free e-letter called Profit Trends, as well as the monthly newsletter Strategic Trends Investor. And he runs a trading service called Extreme Disruptions Trader. Dave lives on a 68-acre farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, Anne. He can frequently be seen on the road in his Tesla Model X. Hi, Dave. Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for our readers today. So you got into the financial newsletter industry via a kind of unique route. Can you tell us how you became a top strategist at The Oxford Club? Sure, Matt. I've been managing my own investments for 46 years. However, what I was doing in my early years of investing was mostly mismanaging them. Sometime around 2003, I received a promotional mailing inviting me to join The Oxford Club. I liked the idea of an investment "club," and I decided to join right away. Shortly after joining, I started making money on my investments. I really appreciated the quality of the articles, as well as the investment ideas from Oxford Club Chief Investment Strategist Alexander Green and the other Editors, which were top-notch. Within six months, I became a Chairman's Circle Member. I was retired at the time and looking for something else to do. (Retirement is highly overrated.) So even though I had no formal training as a writer, I thought it might be fun to write a guest article and submit it to Julia Guth, the Club's CEO and Executive Publisher. I did so, and she liked it. She invited me down to Baltimore to the Club's headquarters. There I met Julia, Alex and a few other employees. That was in December 2006. And the rest is history, as they say. Wow, that's interesting and certainly unusual for our strategists. Now, your focus is on investments in energy, infrastructure and technology. Some of that expertise comes from your previous career as an executive at successful technology companies, right? That's right, Matt. I graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in electrical engineering. I spent four years at Western Electric. That was the manufacturing arm of AT&T. I designed programs to test semiconductor chips. That led me to a job at LTX Corporation, a manufacturer of semiconductor test equipment. AT&T ended up being my largest customer. Over the next 25 years, I sold them roughly $1 billion worth of test equipment. That led to my retirement at age 47. However, as I said earlier, retirement is overrated. So I spent the next several years as the vice president of engineering and operations at a small telecommunications company. And you're the author of a bestselling book, The Energy Disruption Triangle: Three Sectors That Will Change How We Generate, Use, and Store Energy. Can you tell us what that's about and how it might benefit investors looking into the energy technology sector? Sure. I wrote the book because I saw this major disruption coming in the energy sector. At the time, no one was paying any attention to it. But I could see that we were on the cusp of massive changes in the sector. Fossil fuels are being disrupted and are on the way out. Lithium-ion batteries are the new oil. I decided to write a book explaining all these changes in a way that investors could easily understand. You can think of it as a new energy handbook. It gives investors a historical background on our energy supply. It explains the state of our energy supply today and, more importantly, where it's headed in the future. Speaking of high-tech, I know you're a huge fan of Tesla cars. Can you tell us why you're so bullish on this fascinating carmaker? Well, Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, is a true visionary. He started working on electric vehicles more than a decade ago. People laughed at the idea. They're not laughing now. And my wife loves driving our 2016 Model X. Over the last five years, we've driven the car more than 47,000 miles. It's a real pleasure to drive and take trips in. We're on our second set of tires and wiper blades, and that's about it. Well, you've convinced me... I'm even thinking of buying a Tesla. Now, you run a popular trading service that just changed its name to Extreme Disruptions Trader. Why that name? Are there major disruptions coming? How should investors look at them? Technology brings us new disruptions on a daily basis. Technology marches on. Technological advances always happen faster than anyone ever predicts they will. And new technology is almost always disruptive and transformative. Those disruptions have made millionaires out of ordinary people. Investors should look at disruptions as opportunities to "back up the truck and buy." I want to give my subscribers an edge in this area. So I decided to put my years of engineering experience to work identifying some of the most exciting and investible disruptions I see coming. And if Club Members want to know the ones I see coming, they'll have to subscribe to my new service. That's great advice, Dave. Finally, I understand your Pennsylvania farm is pretty high-tech itself. Can you talk a little about the technologies you've implemented there? Of course. Ten years ago, we installed a ground-mounted, 10-kilowatt (kW) solar array. It's across the road from our home and sits out of sight in one of our fields. It provided about half of the power we use on a daily basis. After we purchased our Tesla, we decided we wanted to double our solar energy capacity. So this past July, we added another 10 kW. This summer, we plan to add battery storage to round out our little microgrid. We live in a rural area that often loses power, sometimes for days at a time. Having that battery storage capacity will eliminate the need to fire up our noisy generator and run extension cords everywhere. That's fantastic, Dave. You're basically driving around on sunrays! Thanks again for speaking with me today. I'm sure our readers will want to subscribe to your free e-letter Profit Trends, which they can find here. And if they're interested in your monthly newsletter, Strategic Trends Investor, and the company you call "the Next Tech Giant," they can learn all about it here. Enjoy your weekend and stay safe, Matt | 
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