By WallStreetDaily.com

Identifying high-probability, high-profit opportunities among small-cap stocks all over the world is the reason for Wall Street Daily’s existence.

That’s a big universe of companies to track.

Further complicating the project is the fact that many are cutting-edge innovators in esoteric, highly sophisticated technologies.

So we think you’re likely to benefit from a little assistance in separating the mere great ideas from actual solutions to real-world problems.

The way we get to what’s real – technologies that translate into revenue, earnings and share price growth – is a process that starts with “primary due diligence.”

Yes, that’s a fancy phrase that basically means research. But it’s a very specific type of research that’s crucial to establishing a competitive advantage in the market and making profitable investments.

In addition to reading 10-Ks, 10-Qs, conference call transcripts, and roadshow presentations, we like to go to the sources ourselves. We make visits to company headquarters, talk with executives, and observe day-to-day operations.

This also means picking up the phone and speaking with customers or related parties that have some insights into a company. Insights that wouldn’t be available anywhere else.

And it involves identifying other sources – including academic and industry-specific journals and blogs – that provide in-depth coverage of stuff like nanotechnology and the biomedical revolution.

We’re still in the “tell” phase of our research, identifying the startups and getting a grip on their specific contributions to a technology that may, as American futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, allow us to increase life spans to the degree that we may eventually be able to live as long as we want.

Of course, an infinite existence will require a lot of money.

And we hope you’ll someday see significant profits from companies that are already building the nanobot factories that will make immortality possible.

Nanotechnology, nanorobotics, and nanobots will one day allow us to “transcend the limitations of biology,” helping us fight pathogens as well as cancers.

“You and I are gonna live forever.”
-Oasis

The cool thing? The future is, well… now.

(And it was foretold by the well-received 1966 cinema classic Fantastic Voyage, with Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence, and the 1987 remake Innerspace, with Dennis Quaid, Martin Short and Meg Ryan.)

We’re already making tiny biological machines – “designer microbes” or “genetically modified bacteria” – that are helping to make pharmaceuticals and “sweat” biofuels.

Pretty soon, nanobots will clean up pollution and perform microsurgery.

According to Kurzweil, “What is now a trickle of clinical applications will be a flood in 10 years, when these technologies are again 1,000 times more powerful. They will be 1 million times more powerful than they are today in 20 years.”

Is it really only a matter of time until technology overcomes age-related diseases?

“We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.”
-Oscar Goldman

If we’re to see the day when technology adds more than a year to our life expectancy every year – that, folks, is what we call “immortality” – it’s possible that one, two, or all three of the following companies will be among the innovators that make it happen.

All three “synthetic biology” companies are building factories to produce designer organisms as the race to commercialize the ones that provide real-world solutions to real-world problems accelerates.

They’re all privately held right now.

~ Zymergen: Founded in 2013, Zymergen is using “big data” and robotics to evaluate thousands of microbe strains. Its calling card is cool, way-out-there technology for DNA-manipulating robots.

According to Zymergen CEO Josh Hoffman: “A lot of lab automation is built with [testing] in mind. What we do that’s unusual – and as far as we know, we’re the only people in the world to do it – is we use robots to assemble all the DNA, put it together and stick it across the cell membrane and into the bug itself. And then it integrates.”

One expert in the bio lab field, IndieBio partner Ryan Bethencourt, said that Zymergen “has the potential to become the Google of strain optimization.”

~ Ginkgo Bioworks: The Boston-based firm, founded in 2008, is using automation to manipulate yeast DNA to make fragrances.

Its organism engineering foundry – the world’s first – integrates advanced software, robots and biology to design, build and test bespoke synthetic organisms.

Ginkgo is working on more than 20 organisms for customers looking for a yeast strain for animal feed, a new sweetener for beverages, and an organic pesticide.

~ Synthace: The company’s Antha factory combines expertise in biology, chemistry and computer engineering, anticipating a future in which designing synthetic organisms is as simple as writing code.

The London-based company was recently named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer – an acknowledgment that it’s one of the world’s most innovative companies.

Antha’s open-source operating system for building synthetic organisms should drive rapid productivity growth for bioengineers.

And that’s how Kurzweil’s vision of the future will come to fruition.

Old Things New

It’s been 10 years since the profane and beautiful period show Deadwood prematurely ended its run on HBO.

Word on the street is that HBO has given series creator David Milch the green light to write a script for a two-hour movie that will tie up the story’s loose ends.

Historical characters, including “Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity” Jane Canary, are humanized. Other, lesser-known real people who shaped that Gold Rush camp, such as anti-hero Al Swearengen, played by Ian McShane, are assayed in colorful nuance.

Milch, who also wrote many Deadwood episodes, made the creative decision to use modern foul language as opposed to the vernacular of the time. He was concerned because in early rehearsals, everyone “sounded like Yosemite Sam.”

So the faint of heart should be prepared for a fair share of “colorful” dialogue.

But Deadwood is a pretty cool meditation on anarchy and community in a camp built on Black Hills land that had been granted to the Lakota Sioux in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Over the course of 36 episodes, Milch et al. trace the evolution of order from lawlessness due to the ruthless pursuit of self-interest to the eventual entry of dominant establishment power in the form of George Hearst – yes, the father of “Citizen Kane” William Randolph Hearst.

Smart Investing,

David Dittman
Editorial Director, Wall Street Daily

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