WASHINGTON, D.C. – It’s been a frustrating year for shareholders in Flir Systems, the maker of thermography and infrared imaging technology. The stock has lagged the S&P 500 by 22 percentage points and trades 35% below a 12-month high set last August.

The slow spell could be a good time to do some buying. “Flir has an interesting story to tell,” says Michael Davies, senior research analyst at Next Generation Equity Research and a bull on the company (his employer does no banking or other work for it).

Part of what makes that story interesting, as Forbes reported last October, is Flir’s products and customer roster. The Wilsonville, Ore., company sells gadgets like portable thermal imagers­, which law enforcement or military personnel can use to track targets obscured by darkness, dust, haze or other obscurants. Flir’s cameras are the most widely used to monitor the U.S. border.

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Asked to name his most formative Washington experience, Thomas Kuhn comes back with a quick reply: the Clean Air Act. Kuhn, the chief executive of the Edison Electric Institute, the electric utilities trade group, remembers the tumult that accompanied the passage of that 1990 law.

“Some of the toughest battles in Washington are the environmental battles,” says Kuhn.

And judging by some of the rhetoric flying around Washington this week, more of such battles loom. “Global warming, I believe, is the number one environmental challenge,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told a crowd of several hundred who gathered on Wednesday for the United States Energy Association’s and Johnson Controls’ annual Energy Efficiency Forum. “We have to choose our energy future,” added colleague Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. “We can’t just stumble along and expect everything to work out.”

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What a mess. At the end of May, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledged that thieves had made off with a laptop containing Social Security numbers and other sensitive information for as many as 27 million veterans.

On Wednesday, five veterans groups filed a class action seeking, among other relief, $1,000 for each veteran able to demonstrate being harmed by the data loss.

But, as often happens in business, one man’s disaster is another’s opportunity. For Nicholas Magliato, chief executive of Trust Digital of McLean, Va., situations like the VA’s serve as a way to fire up his 50 employees.

Full story at Forbes.com

Not much has changed since the reformers went after stock analysts in the aftermath of the tech bust. Brokerage firm analysts are still, for the most part, bullish; it’s hard to make a living telling people what not to buy. And their employers still make much of their revenue doing investment banking for companies the analysts are expected to evaluate. Still, the best of the breed certainly earn their keep by making accurate forecasts of earnings. Sanjay Shrestha is one of these.

Shrestha fits the sell-side archetype. He rates 15 of the 18 stocks he covers a “buy” or a “strong buy,” and many of those are companies for which his employer, First Albany Capital, either makes a market or does investment banking. That hasn’t stopped him from making extremely accurate predictions about earnings. For two years he has won a spot in our Best Analysts rankings, based on data maintained by StarMine about individual forecasts.

The 32-year-old Shrestha is quick with a laugh and holds forth freely on topics such as the implications of the polysilicon shortage, the history of 20th-century energy infrastructure or the political turmoil that has recently shaken Nepal, the land of his birth. He has hopes for a return to peace in Kathmandu and is grateful for the opportunities he’s had in America. On an undergraduate scholarship to the College of St. Rose in Albany, he switched from his prior interest in science to finance and turned that background into a Wall Street career. In 2000 he took a job at First Albany covering companies that are developing new energy technologies. Two years later he added the engineering and construction services sector.

Full story at Forbes.com (reg. required)