Decoding Future Nanotech Investment Success

Pattern recognition is a fancy name for learning from the past. Investors use pattern recognition all the time. So do business people, politicians and military strategists. When they see certain things happening, they remember that in the past similar patterns had certain consequences.

Thus when President President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld see a nasty dictator acquiring dangerous weapons, they remember what happened when the world failed to stop an earlier nasty dictator from rearming. Similarly, when the Nasdaq index doubled and redoubled in just a few years, accompanied by talk of new eras and disregard of conventional measurements, experienced investors drew the correct conclusion: A dangerous bubble was forming.

I see in nanotechnology early signs of a promising pattern. We know from past experience that government funding for science and technology eventually creates a pattern wherein new ventures spring up and some of them prosper. And the government funding is already in place for nanotechnology. This newsletter is dedicated to helping its readers profit from this developing pattern.

Just as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding fueled the growth of the Internet and the National Institutes of Health advanced the biotechnology industry, I anticipate that the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) will yield a similar commercialization path for nanotech. The government is, in effect, plowing the field wherein private enterprise will sow the seeds.

http://www.forbes.com/2002/10/10/1010soapbox.html