The hyper focus on bitcoin is causing investors to miss another huge winner this year that they can actually understand.



Bitcoin is just one of many cryptocurrencies, and it is hard to embrace, if impossible not to follow, as it hits $8,000. It isn't tangible, and it certainly is difficult to comprehend. Yet all we hear about is how it's up thousands of percent this year. So you wouldn't be blamed to figure that you simply missed the best investment of 2017 — and possibly ever.

But there's another rising trend that's literally right under your nose: renewable energy. Its potential returns might not come so fast, but I am confident it is here to stay, which is more than I am willing to say about bitcoin.

It used to be that renewable-energy stocks were heavily correlated with carbon-based energy stocks. If the price per barrel of oil rose, so did alternative energy stocks, because higher fossil-fuel prices would make renewable sources of energy more competitively priced. Same thing for the reverse. But that changed this year. The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF (ICLN) is up year-to-date by as much as the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE) is down, and it's a huge divergence by any stretch.