2 Stocks Pioneering 1 Technology That Will Change The World Forever – Forbes

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I don’t often write about single stocks but when I do I don’t usually do too badly. Having said that, with a market that has gone up for years it’s not too difficult to have that record. They say, “You should never confuse brains with a bull market,” meaning even a fool can make nice profits from a rising stock market, so long may that bull run.

While I am a short-, even medium-term bear until the Fed “taper” is bedded in, there will always a hot sector to play in. While it is probably a good idea for both wealth and sanity to steer clear of such speculation, if you can catch those categories early, be ready to trade them sensibly or have identified them as long-term booms then it is time to jump in.

It was cannabis, it was SPACs, it was/is EVs… but what is the next big thing? I wrote some years ago that space would be a big thing on the market and that is developing and worth keeping a close eye on. Then there is the “hydrogen economy” and its fuel cell companies, but what has caught my imagination is DNA manipulation or from an unnuanced position CRISPR.

To many, CRISPR is the ultimate doomsday technology. CRISPR further opens the Pandora’s box of genetic engineering and offers a platform to crack into a DNA double helix, be it human, plant or insect, and amend the many and varied programs of life. The CRISPR-Cas9 technology allows for chemistry to read DNA, crack it open at a certain point and add or remove genes at a desired location. The power of this is that it can be done cheaply and in a living organism.

Love it or hate it, what could be a more powerful or valuable technology?

I like to keep my themes simple. Search engines are great, mobile phones and computing is tremendous, packages to my door in a day, I love it, streaming entertainment to my computer, sure…. But cut out some DNA and save me from cancer or cure my genetic foible or some dreadful one in a host of others, make plant yield increase and then perhaps start repairing the parts of me that will start falling to bits, and those glorious technology businesses pale into insignificance.

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Genetic technology can’t be un-invented and won’t be stopped. No society will give up on research that in a generation might add 20 years onto our lives, kill the sort of virus we are currently laid low with or fight bacterial resistance to antibiotics, cure cancers, promote crop yields, heal terrible genetic illnesses before even thinking about frivolous things like bringing back a woolly mammoth from extinction for the local zoo.

The enormity of the technology speaks for itself.

There is the stock market cliche of buying a stock you can hold forever and in hindsight we all see those opportunities but to be able to catch such a unicorn you have to identify it early and it has to have the arrow of history behind it. This is such a category.

The two unicorns I have piled into wide eyed at the prospects are Editas Medicine (EDIT) and Crispr Theraputics (CRSP). Editas Medicine has a market cap of $4 billion and Crispr Therapeutics $10 billion, which in this era of trillion-dollar companies you could be forgiven for thinking of as microcaps.

This is a chart I’ve seen the likes of 100 times before. This is the short market history of CRSP:

The chart for CRISPR Therapeutics

Credit: ADVFN

Neither company is purely a research platform, with Swiss-based Crispr having around $719 million in sales in 2020, up from $290 million a year earlier, and Editas at $90 million in 2020, up from $20 million in 2019.

The chart for Editas Medicine

Credit: ADVFN

I find it ironic that a bearish, contrarian, value investor like myself should be excited by the same stocks as the doyen of “to the moon” technology stocks, ARK’s Cathie Wood. Yet while I am totally unable to buy expensive stocks that are going to get more expensive, I can totally understand investing in companies worth just a few billion that employ super smart scientists with the tools that could turn the whole world upside down for the good.

So as an investor that begins to shake with anxiety once a 100% profit is on the slate and an ever-increasing desire to sell as those percentages rack up, I will have to try and lock these stocks up and try to forget them. Apart from foresight, the hardest part with holding a stock that will go up massively over the long term is the nerve to keep holding them and that is perhaps not a skill I have yet mastered.

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