Decided to start the investing actual by opening an account on Monday to start trading in US stocks.

Apparently if you file your information properly, you need not pay for taxes if you're not an American citizen.

here's what I have in plan,

1) Set up Trading Account
2) Buy 3-4 stocks from a shortlist of 12 stocks and see how things are going
3) Observe for a few months. If my IRR( or XIRR, since its less than a year) is more than 8%, I can start to think of investing other people's money for higher leverage.

Here is one stock i'm looking at.

1) Energy Recovery Institute

Apparently this company aims to decrease the cost of desalination for it to be competitive with other technologies. There are many reasons why I like this company but its primarily because I embarked on a similar project during my new venture creation of a Heat Pump based MED desalination system. In Theory the system I calculated can be a fraction of current RO costs, but this technology by ERI has already been operating and sucessfully decreasing the cost of desalination for many plants. So I figured, If you cant beat them, Join them!1

Some Reasons why I like this company

1) Great management team. HP Michelet is one of those serial entrepreneurs who has been starting up companies for a very long time.

2) Established Technology. As mentioned they are able to greatly decrease the cost of desal, which is really the achilies hell of desal today. Believe you me, I have read many many reports and I fully agree with that. This translate into a strong substainable competitive advantage

3) High Market Potential. Desalination is growing at double digit rates a yr. Even if ERI captures just a fraction of the market, it can still be very profitable.