I should not be a millionaire. I’m a journalist, a freelance tech writer, with an abiding interest in money.
The fact I have $1.5 million in my IRA, at 70, comes down to two things. Relentless saving, credit going to a wife whose career took off when my own faded. Then two stocks, which by holding made the big money.
I remember writing regularly about Amazon.Com $AMZN early in the last decade. Experts on finance boards said it was unprofitable, which it was. I explained that Amazon was an infrastructure play, how operating cash flow lets it buy for cash what other companies had to borrow money for. I also lectured about the cloud, saying it was like operating systems back in the 1980s, the bottom of the stack, the key to everything. I finally convinced myself to buy some.
The second stock was Nvidia $NVDA. My son helped with this. He was going off to college but insisted on dragging a huge desktop machine halfway across the country for video gaming. Of course it contained a Nvidia gaming card. I learned how gaming was the bleeding edge of technology, and the rest didn’t matter. If you get to the front, and stay there, you’ll find your way.
I’m not looking for capital gains today. I’ve sold out of some Amazon and Nvidia positions. But I’m still looking around corners.
DNA As A Programming Language
In 2019 I was honored to cover the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, where the world’s greatest mathematicians and computer scientists get together to swap insights with some of their young contemporaries. I came out with three themes for this decade.
I said the War Against Oil would be won, and China’s winning it. I said the Machine Internet would transform how we interact with computing, and AI is making it happen. I also said DNA would become a computing language and placed a bet on Moderna $MRNA. That worked during the pandemic. But it has become clear since that AI, not RNA, is going to be the one weird trick here.
It’s unusual for a company that dominates one era of tech to cross the chasm into the next. AI and biotech is a giant chasm, regardless of which direction you’re coming from.
Fortunately, that’s where my son is now. He’s still a student, now going for a Ph.D in biotechnology at Georgia Tech. AI is transforming biotech, bringing discoveries faster than ever. But no one has yet stepped to the front, so the best thing to do is spread your bets. (I didn’t put everything on Amazon or Nvidia.)
AbCellera Biologics $ABCL is a Vancouver-based contract research outfit, which claims they can find new compounds for 60 days in an emergency. Firefly Neuroscience $AIFF develops neuroscience compounds from a proprietary database of 17,000 patients. Recursion Pharmaceuticals $RXRX uses assay databases and AI-driven image analysis to find new compounds for study.
These are all just possibilities. Best of all, they’re all priced well under $10/share. You can get 100 of any of them for less than your current car payment.
When I started, I only bought 100 shares of Amazon. The same with Nvidia.
