By MoneyMorning.com.au
Whether it’s a government program or a private development, there is no doubt that the march of science is unstoppable.
Bloomberg News reports:
‘The Pentagon is exploring the development of implantable probes that may one day help reverse some memory loss caused by brain injury.
‘The goal of the project, still in early stages, is to treat some of the more than 280,000 troops who have suffered brain injuries since 2000, including in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.‘
Of course, the easiest way to eliminate combat injuries is for governments to stop sending young men and women off to fight pointless wars. But where’s the glory in that?
But this continual march of science goes some way to vindicate our decision to launch a technology-focused investment advisory last year. Not only that, but we put our money where our mouth is by hiring a dedicated technology analyst and futurist to scope out the best and most investable technologies on the planet.
But not every aspect of technology is about investing – not directly anyway. That’s why technology analyst Sam Volkering is launching a new free daily eletter to introduce you to the broad technology trends shaping the future…
One of those trends is the future of money. It’s the theme of our 2014 investment conference, World War D.
It was also the subject of the August 2013 issue of Revolutionary Tech Investor. In that issue we presented a vision of the future that had no need for paper money or coins – everything will be electronic. We followed up on that theme in the January issue of Revolutionary Tech Investor with a second stock pick.
The issue of digital money was also the subject of the October 2013 issue of Revolutionary Tech Investor, in which Sam introduced readers to the surprisingly exciting world of cyber security and cyber terrorism. If the world’s economies do head towards a purely digital currency, then security of that data will be paramount.
Of the four stocks, the first is currently down 7.4%, the second is breakeven, while the other two are up 13.9% and 75.1% respectively. Not a bad start for a long-term story.
A New ‘Breeding Ground’ For Ideas
But the truth is, right now only a fraction of the new technologies that Sam investigates are investable right now. A lot of these technologies are still at the development stage. The research is still in universities and private labs.
Sam’s new free eletter – Tech Insider – will give Sam the flexibility of talking about new trends without the need to find an investable opportunity straight away. In a way that will mean Tech Insider will serve a similar function to Money Morning.
That’s the important thing to remember about investing, it’s all about ideas. We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve come up with an idea in these letters and then developed it further into an investing idea for Australian Small-Cap Investigator.
Sam will use Tech Insider in the same way, as the ‘breeding ground’ for new ideas. So, how can you get your name on the list for Sam’s new free eletter? That’s easy. This week we’ll send you an email with simple instructions on how to register.
Look out for it.
Until then, stocks are back on the up. See, we told you not to sell…
US Unemployment Down Again
As the Financial Times notes:
‘In New York, the S&P 500 equity index jumped 1.3 per cent to 1,797, giving it a gain of 0.8 per cent for the week…
‘Friday’s stock market gains came even as a disappointing US employment report added to concerns that momentum in the world’s biggest economy was slowing – which could affect the Federal Reserve’s plans to scale down its stimulus measures.‘
Ah, do we have a return of the ‘bad news is good news’ mentality?
Maybe not. One view is that heavy snow storms in the US impacted the non-farm payroll number, which recorded a lower number than analysts predicted.
On the plus side, the US unemployment rate now sits (officially) at 6.6%. That’s only marginally worse than Australia’s 5.8% unemployment rate. Unofficially, some analysts claim the real rate is much higher, somewhere in the double digits.
That may be true. In fact it probably is. Governments always do what they can to fudge official statistics.
The question is whether enough investors believe the statistics to a large enough degree to give them more confidence to make investments.
That’s something bulls in a bear market and bears in a bull market tend to forget. While they try to pick the top or bottom of the market, they forget that their individual opinion doesn’t matter.
Bull Markets Take Time to Form
What really matters is the opinion of the market – the consensus view.
So far this year the view has switched quickly from bullish to bearish and back again. Investors are looking for any reason to either give them the confidence to buy stocks or to make them cautious to stay away from stocks.
The way we see it is that investors are still looking for reasons to buy. Remember, market crashes are relatively rare events. That’s why investors usually refer to a crash as a single year event – the 1987 crash, the 2001 crash, or the 2008 crash.
Crashes happen quickly and violently.
By contrast, recoveries and bull markets tend to take a long time to mature. They can last for many years – three, four or five years…sometimes even longer.
During that time investors become more confident that stocks will continue to rise. Eventually they become so convinced that stocks will rise that they become afraid of missing out. That’s when you tend to see stock prices really take off.
You could argue that happened in 2013 in the US market and in Japan’s market. But whichever way you look at it, no one can make the same claim about the two most important markets for Aussie investors – the Aussie and Chinese markets.
Over the past year the Aussie market is up a paltry 3.9% and China’s market is down 20.2%.
So for all the talk about overvalued and bubble markets, we simply say, what bubble? The last we checked a bubble was a market where stock prices had skyrocketed to an unrealistically high level.
A 3.9% one-year gain? That doesn’t sound unrealistically high to us.
We’ll challenge anyone who claims the Aussie market is in bubble territory, because the reality is the exact opposite. In fact, as we see it, the best time for Aussie stocks is yet to come.
Cheers,
Kris
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By MoneyMorning.com.au
