RSS 2.0Atom
To add an specific blogger’s feed, simply go to their blog and click on their individual RSS link.
The New Frontier
Rating: not yet rated
Vote: 
InvestorPlace Blogs is powered by Marketocracy. Marketocracy has authorized Investor Place Blogs as an official registrar for voting through Marketocracy's Investment Research Rating service. Registered members of InvestorPlace Blogs are linked with a Marketocracy account to establish voting power based on their performance of trading and posting on stocks.
John Stewart died last month (not the "Daily Show" host but the songwriter and former member of the Kingston Trio). I thought of his song "The New Frontier" inspired by that phrase from a speech by John F. Kennedy in when running for President in 1960. The American public readily adopted the slogan. For some it symbolized our exploration of space. For others it inspired an effort to promote peace and better education while fighting prejudice and poverty. Since that time, although many of our goals have been achieved new challenges have arisen. The nature of the frontier is always changing. The space race helped accelerate computer development and the information age. (Would you believe we went to the moon on only 32 megabytes?) Faster computers enabled us to map the human genome more quickly than anybody thought. Our new biotech capabilities will give rise to new developments that we have not yet dreamed of. As for investing in all this progress? Back in the '60s I would have said that the future looked especially good for IBM with competition from NCR once they developed new products. That's a sobering thought as I try to evaluate companies, today. | ||
Searching for Synthetics and Striking Water
Rating: 2.33 (3 votes)
Vote:
InvestorPlace Blogs is powered by Marketocracy. Marketocracy has authorized Investor Place Blogs as an official registrar for voting through Marketocracy's Investment Research Rating service. Registered members of InvestorPlace Blogs are linked with a Marketocracy account to establish voting power based on their performance of trading and posting on stocks.
ICO, Inc. (ICOC) has been sinking in spite of inclusion in a Motley Fool article saying that Synthetics have been doing quite well. Therefore, after selling ICO I considered buying another "synthetic". The companies Motley Fool includes in this group turned out to be a quite varied lot. Looking each company's "competitors" at Yahoo I see that Yahoo puts them in quite a variety of categories. ICOC is in Yahoo's "chemical company" category, where the rising stars are potash, nitrogen and fertilizer companies. There's nothing wrong with that, but I've already chosen some ag-related stocks. I didn't (yet) settle on a synthetic for the Strategy Lab fund. Meanwhile, I've been reading how water -- yes, water --is likely to be the next scarce product. Although it is "free", living in Colorado I've always been aware that there can be too little to go around for irrigation. Plus, in parts of the world making it safe to drink is a growing problem. This is also close to home because Colorado has a recent crisis with mine drainage contamination and the possibility that a blocked tunnel could blow out releasing heavy metals into the Arkansas River. In addition, there is an increasing need for super-purified water for scientific use. So for StrategyLab I ended up buying water-related companies Veolia Environnement SA (VE), which among other things provides drinking water plants, wastewater decontamination and recycling plants and Lindsay Corporation (LNN), even though Lindsay is involved in ag-related-irrigation. Well, I started out looking for synthetics and ended up with H2O which is about as un-synthetic as you can get. However during the search I found a promising MicroCap, American Pacific Corp. (APFC), which manufactures specialty and fine chemicals. It is too small for my contest criteria but I bought it for my Magic MicroCaps fund. | ||
