The Crown Jewel

“Every man's memory is his private literature.” - Aldous Huxley.

'Tis the season for Black Friday doorbuster sales with e-commerce companies bombarding you with banner advertisements featuring products you've recently searched for. Deep pocketed behemoths such as Walmart, Amazon and Target utilize predatory pricing with eye-popping deals in hand-to-hand retail combat. This is not the era for upstarts. It's just the opposite. An unanticipated dividend for consumers is that products or services may be had for a song. I recently gifted myself Apple News+, the magazine distribution app, and have been transformed into a news junkie of late. A great stocking stuffer. Much like on-demand streaming for cord cutters, you receive sequential print releases, or you can binge read your favorite periodicals. Some newspapers are included, too.

I'm always looking to make a quick buck in the stock market. It's difficult to do on a consistent basis, but I still scan the headlines on Apple News+ looking for articles that may enhance my bottom line. An article that recently caught my eye is from SyFyWire, "Tangible Holograms Go Beyond Anything Star Wars Ever Dreamed Of", by Elizabeth Rayne. The report begins describing a scene from Star Wars - Phantom Menace , "When R2D2 acts like a futuristic answering machine and beams a hologram of Leia pleading for help.". Although the movie was a disaster, the special effects were not. The hologram communications were a show stopper. Like many science fiction technologies in the movies, it can take years to become adopted for everyday use. A prime example is Uber.

The impetus for the formation of Uber was founder Travis Kalanick watching a James Bond movie in the early 2000's or thereabouts. During a getaway scene, 007 had a GPS enabled cellphone that allows him to escape his adversaries. In reality, there was no such thing as a smartphone or GPS at that time. Kalanick had the foresight to let the technology catch up with the movie magic. Just a pipe dream at the onset. It's the same thing with Elon Musk and vertical landings of SpaceX rockets. The Apollo rockets couldn't do vertical touchdowns because the gyroscopes, semiconductors, software and imaging systems weren't advanced enough. Almost every SciFi film in the 50's and 60's had reusable rockets. Remember Fireball xL5? Musk just waited and voilà, the future is now.

My impression is that holograms are just like television in the late 1920's - a technology in its infancy, but will eventually become mainstream. According to the SyFyWire piece, a prototype hologram projector has been developed with speech and tactile effects, making the 3D images seem closer to reality. I'd call that first mover advantage, but we've got a long way to go. In a decade, this technology will be the hottest ticket in town. From bit player to bankable star. It's an area of scientific expertise I am going to monitor going forward.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere with the Silicon Valley conglomerates commanding the lion's share of the market. They claim their monopolies are for "the greater good". That remains to be seen. But the easy money has been made in the Googles and the Facebooks. One technology segment I like is Augmented Reality. The 2002 movie Minority Report features Augmented Reality in the form of a hologram. Although the film is set in 2054, some of the tactics and technologies the PreCrime police utilize in the film will become mainstream in just a decade from now. Wall Street has taken notice and bets have been placed. There are a few pure plays that trade, primarily headset and laser companies, but most of the action is taking place with the venture capitalists. As a retail investor, you're out of luck if you want to get in on the ground floor.

I'd like to hit it big, but investing in individual stocks can be a cautionary tale. I learned the hard way. You see commercials from the discount brokers where a trader has a Eureka moment huddled over a stock chart in the middle of the night. That's not the way the smart money bets these days. They buy S&P 500 index funds. It's too difficult to beat the market. However, that doesn't stop me from looking for patterns in technology. What young company is the odds on favorite to become mainstream? The ninety-nine thousand dollar question. That's when you make all the money, investing in the Microsoft IPO, or, Apple after the introduction of the iPod. You need a disruptive product that's adopted by the masses in order to make a killing.