When starting this blog, I knew it would happen eventually; a listed alternative energy company would fail and have to be taken off the stockmarket and of course off AEI.

Tomorrow, Biofuels Corp will have its trading facility cancelled on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange, effective from 07:00. Henceforth, the company will be trading under the name of Earls Nook Limited.

So here are my post-mortem thoughts on Biofuels Corp, which as you'll see from the 1 year chart, has lost a lot of money for its investors.

1. The company name was wrong - you can't brand yourself with a generic term, especially when their core business was biodiesel, a small part of the global biofuel industry. Imagine calling microsoft the software company.

2. I have severe doubts about companies going public without a business up and running in place already. Biofuels Corp was a development company. Couldn't they have seen a VC instead?

Venture Capitalists are active managers and owners, sometimes taking a seat on the board, in exchange for a sizeable chunk of equity, proffering valuable management advice and firing when need be. Fund Managers and retail investors who provide capital on the public market are manifestly not in this category. In reality, the IPO comes as the crowning glory, the final stage or the exit for a company, not as the seed capital.

3. The idea behind Biofuels Corp in principle was sound - Europe has high biofuel targets in place, and most of the contribution will probably be met by biodiesel as the relevant feedstock crops grow better there.

So au revoir Biofuels Corp - for AEI, you were the first, but you won't be the last to go . . .