Contradictions are rife in the societies that surround us. America is one of two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies can peddle drugs directly to consumers, but if you smoke a plant that grows like a weed, you’ll get put in the slammer in some states. So why has it taken so long for […]
A large brokerage firm once audited their retail investor accounts to see what characteristics could be attributed to high returns. Turns out that patience is not only a virtue, but a great way to generate alpha. The highest-performing accounts belonged to people who forgot about them or had died. Rome wasn’t built in a day, […]
Few investment themes have attracted more interest from newbie investors than cannabis. (No, we’ve never considered crypto in its current form to be much of an investment.) Along with strong retail investor interest comes extreme volatility reminiscent of meme stocks. Institutional investors can’t participate and provide stability because many don’t want to get involved with […]
The more popular an investment theme becomes, the more likely retail investors get burned. Hype around any particular thesis is often driven by niche pundits who spout every bullish point they can dream up in newsletters that double as promotion platforms. That’s why we only invest in a thesis after heavily scrutinizing the space, and […]
Someone should do a study that explores how many cannabis investors smoke cannabis. To truly appreciate the potential, you probably need to understand the product. Similarly, one wonders how many investors in psychedelic stocks understand the potential because they’ve experienced just how profoundly moving an acid trip is, or how much darn fun mushrooms can […]
The great thing about sin stocks is that they’re resilient to bear markets. That’s because when things go pear-shaped, there’s always some consolation to be found in the bottom of a bottle. Nobody smokes fewer cigarettes in a bear market. If anything, people will smoke more and drink more. And they won’t necessarily switch to […]
Oftentimes we’ll come across an investment thesis that crosses multiple disruptive trends. One example would be LiDAR, a technology used in robotics, industrial machinery, smart infrastructure, and autonomous vehicles. Another example is machine vision which is used for a similar swath of use cases. Then we have the indoor growing thesis which lends itself to […]
If we had to pick the most complex investment themes we cover, synthetic biology and gene editing would be at the top. So would cannabis. Legalizing marijuana for adult use in various states while keeping things illegal at the federal level has created a very complex environment to navigate. As with any thesis, our goal […]
For a drug that’s illegal at the federal level, cannabis sure has built a strong brand for itself. Nearly half of all Americans polled by Gallup said they’ve tried cannabis. That’s up from 38% in 2013. One wonders if the uptake is more attributable to changing attitudes towards something Americans declared war on in the […]
If you think you’ll day trade your way into a better zip code, think again. Thousands of hedge funds across the globe employ millions of sneaky little AI algorithms that monitor the world’s big data. All that data exhaust being generated by alternative data providers is ingested to provide signals for trading strategies that generate […]