A friend of mine, Ben, did what many of us dream about a few years back.
He was in middle management, deeply ensconced in a big accounting firm in downtown San Francisco. It paid great, but Ben hated the job: long hours, a ridiculous commute, tons of boring meetings, eating lunch at the desk every day. You know the routine.
But unlike so many of us, Ben took action. He regained his freedom.
He quit his job, cashed out some of his investments, moved to the country, and became an independent trucker.
He loves it. He loves chatting with other truckers, eating at greasy spoons, listening to talk radio all day, being his own boss… pretty much.
But he also hates it, sometimes. That’s because Ben’s “boss,” such as it is, is a computer that tells him where to go, when to get there, when to pull over to fill up or for maintenance, even when to go to bed.
Yup, like I tell you so often, every business is a tech business – even trucking.
A few years back, I showed you folks one way to cash in on tech’s takeover of trucking by recommending FleetCor Technologies Inc. (NYSE: FLT), a commercial fleet-focused electronic payments company. And if you made that move, you’re sitting on some pretty big gains – 135.8%.
FleetCor still has plenty of room to run – up to 20% in just the next 12 months.
But there’s another trucking technology investment out there that I want to tell you about. And I need to tell you about it now – today.
That’s because midnight, Dec. 18, a little-known federal mandate will go into effect across the United States.
It requires the immediate deployment of a cutting-edge technology for the trucking industry. It’s “Ben’s boss.”
I call it an Augmented Digital Copilot – or ADC for short. (I can’t tell you what Ben calls it.)
And just one tiny company has meticulously developed the technology to dominate this market. Only it can fulfill the immense and imminent demand for these devices.
This small, under-the-radar firm is on the verge of earning a big chunk of the $2 billion windfall that this federal mandate is creating.
That will send its stock soaring and make its investors a fortune.
No, I’m not talking about how twenty- and thirtysomethings are affecting the market.
Instead, I’m talking about how we now measure the advance of the bellwether Dow Jones Industrial Average not by hundreds, but by thousands.
The Doe has advanced by 1,000 points by five times this year… so far.
In fact, it took just 30 days for it to reach 24,000 on Nov. 30.
That’s great news for just about every investor.
But the news is even better for investors like you.
For technology investors, the Nasdaq Composite set 69 new highs so far this year. It has gained 23.3%, which is 49.5% better than the S&P 500 and 15.7% better than the Dow.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is up 1,075% in 2017 – and Ethereum has soared an amazing 5,371.4%.
And in legal marijuana, my premium Nova-X Report members have made triple-digit gains on several of the penny pot stocks in their model portfolio. To find out how to join them, just click here.
In other words, ground-floor trends like technology, cryptocurrencies, and legal marijuana are the driving forces behind the market’s historic gains.
But that doesn’t mean you can just blindly buy any tech stock out there and expect to make money.
While I know you don’t believe that’s true, some of you might buy into Wall Street’s hype machine – and believe you can make a fortune on some of the troubled tech leaders they’re touting as “turnaround” investments in 2018.
Don’t believe that hype.
Especially don’t believe any hype you might hear about these 2018 Tech Dogs.
These are the four stocks you want to stay as far away as possible from next year. They’re dangerous – all four of them.
If you follow the chip sector, you might be confused.
Check out what’s happened in just the past month…
On Nov. 3 we learned that Marvell Technology Group Ltd.(Nasdaq: MRVL) is in talks to buy Cavium Inc. (Nasdaq: CAVM). The pact would create a chip firm worth some $14 billion but the deal is yet to be consummated.
But that was small potatoes compared to what came next.
On Nov. 13, Qualcomm Inc.(Nasdaq: QCOM) rejected a $105 billion buyout offer from Broadcom Ltd.(Nasdaq: AVGO) – what would have been the biggest tech buyout in history. As a leading supplier of mobile-chip technology, Qualcomm says it’s better off operating on its own rather than merge with.
And all that comes after Qualcomm offered $39 billion to buy NXP Semiconductors NV (Nasdaq: NXPI). At the time, that was the record amount for a chip sector takeover.
Moreover, Wall Street analysts seem to be constantly putting the semiconductor sector on “watch” – saying the current chip surge is about to run out… today… tomorrow… next week.
But they’re always wrong.
If you’re not sure where you should be putting your money after mixed messages like that, I understand. Like I said, it gets confusing.
However, you do want some money in semiconductors.
See, the chip industry is consolidating not out of weakness, but strength.
A recent report by industry trade group SEMI forecasts that silicon shipments will hit 11.49 billion square inches this year, 11.8 billion next year, and 12.24 billion in 2019. Total shipments of “wafers” – the format silicon is produced in – for this year will break the record set back in 2016. And shipments will continue at record levels for each of the next two years.
And that’s just one robust forecast – I’ll show you a couple more below.
Still, if you’re not up for picking and choosing among the acquirers and acquireds, there is a way to make money off the on again/off again Qualcomm-Broadcom merger, the Marvell-Cavium lockup, and just about any other chip-sector M&A that comes along.
For one, I’m a bit taller than the average guy. My hair went silver earlier than I expected. And I’m fortunate that it’s easier for me to keep trim than a lot of people I know.
On the downside, I’ve got various allergies and genetic maladies that most folks don’t.
My environment isn’t average either. Here in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, I spend my days in some of the most polluted cities in the United States. Of course, in other ways, this region rates much higher than most of America.
Then there are my habits. For example, I eat well, but don’t get to the gym enough.
I bet you’re the same way – but different.
No one is average.
And that’s why it often seems like maintaining a healthy diet, getting plenty of exercise, and regular checkups just aren’t enough to keep us healthy. If it were, no one would gain too much weight, go bald at 30, or get cancer.
By our very nature, each of us is so unique that this one-size-fits-all approach just isn’t enough.
That’s what opened the door for an emerging field known as precision medicine. The idea here is to set up disease prevention and treatment measures for each and every individual, accounting for your genes, environment, and lifestyle… for my genes, environment, and lifestyle.
Think of it as a partnership – a “convergence” – among traditional medicine, molecular biology, data analysis, and cloud computing.
Doctors and other medical diagnosticians collect our info, and then feed it to the cloud. There software and data scientists can crunch through all that data – and then use what they turn up to prescribe precise disease treatments and preventative measures for each individual.
Mordor Intelligence has run the numbers – and says precision medicine will be worth $59.2 billion by 2021
Thanks to legal recreational use of marijuana about to launch in California and nationwide up in Canada, sometimes it’s easy to forget where we got started here.
Legal marijuana first came to my attention because of the “War on Pain.”
Let me explain…
In a study a year or so ago, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that about 11% of Americans suffered from debilitating pain. Other sources say the number of this country’s pain sufferers may run as high as 50 million.
But I don’t need statistics to know that millions of Americans suffer from serious pain problems.
I do so myself – and so do many of my friends and family members.
And that has turned the market for pain medication into a huge business. According to market researcher VisionGain, the worldwide business for pain drugs is worth about $68 billion right now.
Other studies say it’s even bigger.
Equally huge is the nation’s opioid crisis.
President Donald Trump has declared the opioid crisis a “public health emergency,” and a White House commission has released its final report on the epidemic, calling for more drug courts, greater training for doctors, and penalties for insurers who do not cover addiction treatment.
The number of opioid-related deaths rose 75%, from roughly 20,000 in 2010 to 35,000 in 2015. In other words, opioid-based drugs kill more than 100 Americans every day.
This surge in the number of pain sufferers – coupled with the snapback against the prescription of opioid drugs – has opened the door to a wholly new approach to pain treatment.
I’m talking about medical marijuana and all its derivatives.
As dry as they may be, let’s go over some numbers.
On Oct. 23, the S&P 500 broke the record for the number of consecutive days without a 3% decline. The previous record was set back in 1996, when the S&P went 241 days without a meaningful decline.
Since Jan. 1, the S&P has closed at a record high 66 times – the most since the mid-1990s.
So far this year, the S&P has dropped by 1% or more in a single day only four times. That’s its longest stretch we’ve seen since 1964.
Sounds great – if a bit boring (volatility is also at record lows).
However, there is a huge problem with this generational bull market. It makes me nuts that many investors – too many of you folks reading this – are sitting on the sidelines.
It’s bonkers. I don’t get it.
While it sounds counterintuitive, many investors stay out of record markets because they fear the good times could come to an end any day now.
I know this describes many of you folks because you write and tell me that you’re afraid of this “peaky” market.
Fear no longer.
Here’s the thing. If you’ve got the right “toolkit,” you can stay in any sort of market – a high one poised for a dip, a low one about to soar, or anything in between – and make money.
The sort of number that doesn’t show up on anyone’s radar.
Except mine.
And now yours.
I’m talking about a tech sector whose overall sales grew 3.3% in the third quarter. True, that sounds meaningless – like something you wouldn’t want to invest in.
But I drilled down below the surface, and I found a lot of money to be made from this meager bounce.
Here’s the thing. It’s a small tick on the information technology (IT) services sector’s massive $3.5 trillion base.
When I look closer, I see that most of that growth – billions and billions of dollars of growth – is thanks to global corporations and other huge enterprises moving their IT services to the cloud. Doing that allows them to cut back spending on computer networks and makes it easier to add new services on the fly.
And it gives tech investors a target-rich environment.
So while others ignore the billions of dollars moving around in this often-forgotten part of the tech ecosystem, let’s look what I think will be a hugely profitable way to invest in this massive market.
It’s a company the mainstream financial media virtually ignores.
Maybe Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOGL) should have named its new smartphone the “Trojan Horse.”
See, there’s a lot more going on here than the introduction of a new piece of hardware.
Now then, don’t get me wrong. The Pixel 2 is an impressive device.
And on the surface, it seems designed to compete head-on with the iPhone from Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL). After all, it sports a state-of-the-art organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and comes in standard and plus sizes.
The Pixel 2 debuted two weeks ago along with several other pieces of hardware, including an updated laptop and an artificial intelligence-powered wearable camera. And the global leader in online search got generally great reviews for its new products.
However, I have to say the real star of the show received almost no attention.
It’s the hidden ingredient that is the true driving force behind these moves.
Right now, on a big screen near you, Ryan Gosling’s character in Blade Runner 2049 is piloting a flying car known as a “Spinner” to hunt down renegade androids – replicants.
The flying car is an idea so old it’s almost timeless.
But I trace its modern beginnings back to 1926, when Henry Ford himself showed off the “sky flivver” – a tiny, 350-pound, single-seat monoplane – to the press.
Just take a look at this Oct. 5 headline: “China’s Tech Stocks Are Partying Like It’s 1999.”
“Shares in China’s biggest internet companies are on a tear this year,” Shane went on to write, “but some investors think things have gone too far.”
The guy didn’t even have the guts to make this argument himself. Instead, he leaned on “some investors.”
To me, this is just the latest rehash of the half-decade-old effort – among “some investors” – to prove that a Silicon Valley “tech bubble” was about to burst.
This time, there’s a slight twist. The bears’ latest “bubble” is across the Pacific Ocean, among Chinese web firms.
The idea at work here is that China’s entire e-commerce sector is about to go the way of the “dot-com” crash that slaughtered the Nasdaq Composite more than 17 years ago.
Here’s the thing. Shane’s entire premise is based on a false analysis. I think “some investors” may have led him astray.
Today, I’ll show you, with math, that the opposite is true.
I’ll prove that China’s web leaders are not in a bubble – and that they offer tech investors like you huge long-term upside.
But unlike so many of us, Ben took action. He regained his freedom.