Every quarter, I go through 13F filings looking for something that apparently has become deeply unfashionable in modern investing.

Good ideas. Not trading systems. Not penny-stock miracles.

Not the newest artificial intelligence stock that is going to increase revenues by 6,000% sometime around 2034.

Not a proprietary indicator being sold by a gentleman who claims to win 93% of his trades but, for some mysterious reason, still needs your $199 a month.

I am looking for stocks that very successful professional investors are actually buying with real money.

There is a difference.

I have been beating this drum for years because 13F filings are probably the largest free investment research department in the world. Every quarter, institutional investment managers have to show us a substantial portion of what they own. We get to look at the portfolios, compare them with the previous quarter, and identify where successful managers are putting additional capital to work.

It is not perfect information.

It is delayed. We do not see short positions. We do not know the complete investment thesis. We cannot always tell precisely when during the quarter a stock was purchased.

None of that bothers me very much.

I am not trying to copy somebody’s portfolio.

I am stealing research ideas.

There is an enormous difference between the two.

When an investment manager has spent decades developing expertise in a particular industry and suddenly buys several million dollars’ worth of a stock in that industry, I want to know why.

Then I can do my own homework.

Apparently, this approach is insufficiently exciting for some investors.

They would rather chase unicorns.

They would rather smoke hopium while looking for the next stock that will turn $5,000 into $5 million before Thanksgiving.

They would rather discover the trading strategy with an 87% winning percentage, no losing months, and returns that would make Renaissance Technologies executives question their career choices.

Good luck.

I will keep reading the filings.

For the Alpha Buying newsletter, one of the most interesting managers in the latest batch of 13Fs is Electron Capital Partners.

Electron is exactly the type of investment firm I like to find in these filings because it operates in a specialized corner of the market and has accumulated decades of experience doing so.

The firm is a New York-based investment adviser founded in 2005. Electron specializes in global clean energy, infrastructure, and utilities, using a long-short equity strategy designed to generate risk-adjusted returns regardless of the direction of the broader market. The firm’s investment process is based on fundamental, bottom-up research conducted against a backdrop of major structural changes in energy production and consumption.

That specialization matters.

If I want somebody’s opinion about a regional bank, I would rather listen to an investor who has spent 25 years studying banks than somebody who discovered the sector last Tuesday.

The same principle applies to energy infrastructure.

Electron has been studying electricity markets, utilities, energy infrastructure, and the transition of the global power system for about two decades. According to the firm, its investment process begins by identifying structural change and then examining how those changes affect individual companies, industries, and geographic markets.

That is especially interesting right now.

Electricity demand is rising. Data centers and artificial intelligence are increasing the need for generation and transmission capacity. Utilities are making enormous capital investments. Renewable power continues to expand, although the economics and political landscape have become considerably more complicated. Traditional hydrocarbons remain essential, while geothermal and other emerging technologies are attempting to become commercially competitive.

There are a lot of moving parts.

Electron has people whose full-time job is figuring them out.

The firm says its investment professionals collectively conduct more than 1,000 meetings a year with corporate management teams, regulators, and industry consultants. Electron describes the process as “hunt as a pack,” with analysts and portfolio managers sharing information across one pool of capital rather than competing internally over individual positions.

That sounds like a pretty decent research department.

We get to peek over their shoulder every quarter for free.

Electron was founded by James “Jos” Shaver, who today remains founding partner and senior adviser. Ran Zhou, who has been with Electron for 20 years, is now managing partner and chief investment officer. Neil Choi is a partner and portfolio manager, while Jeff Zheng is a partner involved in special projects and trading. The firm’s four senior investment partners average about 25 years of industry experience.

Zhou took over leadership of the investment operation after Shaver stepped back from day-to-day management. The transition is interesting because Electron did not reinvent itself. The firm’s emphasis remains specialized fundamental stock picking around electricity, infrastructure, and changing patterns of energy consumption. In a 2025 interview, Zhou said much of Electron’s historical gains had come from identifying structural changes early and holding investments long enough for those changes to play out.

That is pretty much the opposite of checking your phone every 11 minutes to see whether a stock has broken above its 17-minute moving average.

Electron’s latest 13F provides a useful look at where that research process is finding opportunities. The filing reported approximately $2.5 billion of securities across 46 positions, with significant activity across the portfolio.

Five purchases caught my attention.

Primoris Services, XPLR Infrastructure, PG&E, Fervo Energy, and Transocean are very different companies.

They share one broad characteristic.

Every one of them sits somewhere in the increasingly important infrastructure and energy ecosystem.

That makes them worth a closer look.

Primoris Services Corporation (PRIM)

Primoris is perhaps the easiest one to understand.

It is an infrastructure contractor.

The company provides engineering, construction, and maintenance services to utility, energy, and renewable-energy customers across the United States and Canada. Its crews build and maintain many of the things the modern economy desperately needs more of, including power infrastructure, communications infrastructure, and energy-related construction projects.

This is one of those businesses that suddenly becomes a lot more interesting when everybody discovers that electricity does not magically emerge from the wall outlet.

We can build all the artificial intelligence data centers we want. Somebody still has to build the substations, transmission connections, power infrastructure, and associated facilities that allow those giant collections of chips to operate.

Primoris is one of the companies doing that work.

The operating momentum has been substantial. In the second quarter of 2026, the company reported more than $3.9 billion of new project awards and record bookings and backlog.

Electron made Primoris a new position during the second quarter, buying approximately 415,000 shares worth about $41 million as of June 30.

This is exactly why I read 13Fs.

Maybe PRIM is attractive at today’s valuation.

Maybe it is not.

However, when a specialist infrastructure investor with 20 years of experience establishes a $41 million position in an infrastructure contractor during one of the largest power-construction cycles in modern history, that stock is going on my research list.

XPLR Infrastructure (XIFR)

XPLR Infrastructure is a very different situation.

Older readers may remember this company as NextEra Energy Partners. It changed its name to XPLR Infrastructure in 2025.

The partnership owns contracted clean-energy infrastructure assets, primarily renewable-energy projects designed to generate long-duration cash flows. Management says its goal is to create value by allocating the cash generated by those assets while positioning the company to benefit from long-term growth in the U.S. power market.

The story has not been painless.

Far from it.

In early 2025, XPLR suspended its distribution indefinitely as part of a major restructuring of its capital-allocation plans. The stock was hammered as income investors headed for the exits.

You know what occasionally happens after almost everybody who hates a stock has already sold it?

The stock gets interesting.

Electron established a new XPLR position during the second quarter, owning approximately 343,000 units valued at about $4 million as of June 30.

This is not one of Electron’s largest bets.

It is still worth noticing.

Troubled securities that own valuable infrastructure can become very interesting when balance-sheet and financing problems begin moving in the right direction. That does not mean XIFR is automatically cheap enough to buy.

It means an experienced specialist apparently believes the situation deserves capital.

That earns it some of our research time.

PG&E Corporation (PCG)

PG&E is much better known.

PG&E owns Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the regulated utility serving more than 16 million people across Northern and Central California. The company provides electricity and natural gas across roughly 70,000 square miles and serves millions of electric and natural gas customers.

It is also one of the most complicated major utilities in America.

Wildfire liabilities, regulation, bankruptcy, and California politics have given investors enough headaches over the years to support several pharmaceutical companies.

That history is precisely why the stock can occasionally become interesting.

PG&E today is carrying out an enormous capital-investment program designed to improve safety, harden the grid, and expand capacity. The company reported second-quarter 2026 income available to common shareholders of $733 million, or $0.33 per diluted share, compared with $521 million and $0.24 a year earlier.

Unlike the other new positions on this list, PG&E was already in Electron’s portfolio. The firm added to its position during the quarter, bringing its stake to approximately 3.68 million shares worth almost $62 million as of June 30.

Again, I pay attention.

Utility investing is Electron’s home field.

If the people who spend their lives studying electric utilities decide to increase their exposure to PG&E, I want to investigate their possible reasoning.

Fervo Energy (FRVO)

Then there is Fervo Energy.

This one may be the most fascinating company on the list.

Fervo is attempting to take technologies developed in the oil and gas drilling industry and use them to transform geothermal electricity generation.

Traditional geothermal development depends heavily on finding naturally occurring underground geological formations containing the right combination of heat, water, and permeability.

Fervo’s approach uses advanced drilling techniques to create or access geothermal resources in a much larger number of locations.

The objective is extraordinarily attractive.

Geothermal power can provide carbon-free electricity 24 hours a day.

That eliminates one of the largest disadvantages associated with wind and solar generation.

The sun occasionally performs the inconsiderate act of setting.

The wind sometimes stops blowing.

The earth remains hot.

Fervo completed its initial public offering in May, selling 70 million shares at $27 and raising approximately $1.89 billion.

The company is using a substantial portion of that capital to develop Cape Station in Utah and other geothermal projects. Fervo also has a development framework with Google covering the potential development of as much as 3 gigawatts of geothermal capacity through 2033.

This is not a mature, cash-producing utility.

Fervo reported a second-quarter operating loss of $28.7 million and a net loss of $55.9 million while spending $226.5 million on capital projects.

In other words, this is an emerging-technology investment.

That carries considerably more risk.

Electron nevertheless established a new position during the second quarter. The filing shows 459,840 shares of Fervo worth approximately $13.4 million as of June 30.

That one immediately goes onto my watch list.

Fervo sits at the intersection of several enormous trends:

Rising electricity demand.

Data-center construction.

Energy security.

Advanced drilling technology.

The search for reliable generation that does not depend on weather.

There is a long way between a promising technology and a profitable investment.

We should never confuse the two.

Still, this is precisely the sort of situation where having highly experienced specialist investors doing research ahead of us is extremely valuable.

Transocean (RIG)

Finally, Electron established a new position in Transocean.

Transocean operates one of the world’s leading offshore drilling fleets, specializing in ultra-deepwater and harsh-environment drilling. Its floating rigs and drillships are designed to work in some of the most difficult offshore environments on the planet.

This is definitely not what most people picture when they hear the phrase “energy transition.”

That is why it is interesting.

The transition in global energy consumption is not taking place by shutting down every oil well on Tuesday afternoon.

Oil and natural gas remain essential components of the global energy system.

Offshore oil production also has some attractive characteristics. Large discoveries can produce substantial volumes for many years, and years of underinvestment in offshore drilling capacity can create favorable economics when exploration and development spending eventually rises.

Transocean is highly cyclical.

It has substantial financial leverage.

Its business depends on offshore drilling demand, day rates, and the willingness of major energy companies to commit billions of dollars to long-term offshore projects.

Nobody should mistake RIG for a widows-and-orphans utility stock.

Electron apparently sees something worth exploring.

The firm established a new position of approximately 4.65 million Transocean shares during the second quarter, worth about $22.7 million as of June 30.

That purchase might be the most interesting signal in the entire group.

An investment manager known primarily for studying utilities, infrastructure, and the evolution of the electricity system is willing to allocate capital to one of the world’s major offshore drilling contractors.

That reminds us of something important.

The energy transition is going to be complicated.

It will not be a straight line from hydrocarbons to solar panels.

The world needs more electricity, more transmission, more natural gas, more storage, more conventional generation, more renewable generation, and probably more geothermal power.

It may simultaneously require substantial continued investment in oil production.

That creates opportunities across the entire energy-infrastructure ecosystem.

Electron’s purchases provide a pretty useful starting list.

PRIM gives us exposure to the companies physically building infrastructure.

PCG gives us regulated-utility exposure to enormous grid-investment requirements.

XIFR offers a battered clean-energy infrastructure situation.

FRVO gives us an emerging geothermal technology story.

RIG gives us exposure to the increasingly valuable supply of sophisticated offshore drilling equipment.

I am not telling you to buy all five.

I am telling you that all five deserve investigation.

That is the whole point of using 13Fs.

We do not blindly follow other investors.

We use their work to become more efficient researchers.

Electron Capital employs a specialized team that has spent roughly two decades studying these industries. Its professionals meet constantly with corporate executives, regulators, and consultants. They analyze electricity markets around the world. They study structural changes in supply, demand, technology, and regulation.

Then, every quarter, the SEC makes them show us a portion of the result.

For free.

I continue to be amazed that more investors do not take advantage of this.

People will spend hours scrolling through social media looking for stock tips from individuals whose primary investment qualification appears to be owning an expensive microphone.

They will chase penny stocks.

They will buy trading courses.

They will hunt unicorns.

Meanwhile, some of the best specialized investors in the world are filing shopping lists with the SEC.

I know which approach I prefer.

We will do our own research before putting a dollar into any of these stocks.

But having Electron Capital Partners narrow the energy and infrastructure universe down for us is a pretty good place to start.

Stealing good ideas is perfectly legal.

When the SEC organizes the burglary for us every quarter, it would be rude not to participate.