I just talked to one of my heroes

Stephen McBride
December 15, 2023
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Where Innovation Meets Investing

Happy Friday!

The S&P 500 is up 5% over the past month.

It’s funny to think Wall Street strategists expected stocks to FALL this year. These guys have access to every high-powered investing tool imaginable plus armies of Ivy League grads… and they still got it wrong.

Trying to predict the stock market is a waste of time.

Instead, we invest in great businesses profiting from disruption—which can add to our wealth no matter which way the market winds are blowing.

Let’s get after it…

I just talked to one of my heroes.

Matt Ridley is a bestselling author and one of the world’s most important thinkers.

His book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, changed my life. It helped me see what was right with the world instead of getting bogged down in the constant doom and gloom.

During an hour-long chat with Matt yesterday I asked him, “What are you most excited about?”

His answer: biomedicine. Innovations like gene editing that allow doctors to “edit” diseases out of our bodies.

Matt pointed out that each generation experiences a different kind of technological revolution.

His parents were born when the best way to get around was by horse and buggy. But they lived to see the moon landing.

Computers and the internet transformed our world over the past 50 years.

Matt thinks the biomedicine revolution comes next. It’ll feature AI drug development… cancer-killing pills… and the ability to “delete” diseases from our bodies.

I agree, which is why we own the world’s top biologics companies in Disruption Investor.

Matt is also excited about AI, and we may collaborate on a new project around this megatrend. More to come in 2024!

Some kid just shut down the world’s largest bank.

Seriously.

China’s ICBC—the world’s largest bank—was crippled by a cyberattack.

The hack left it unable to clear tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US Treasury trades. ICBC was forced to send settlement details (again, worth billions of dollars) via courier carrying a USB stick.

That happened a week after hackers brought Australia’s largest port to its knees, causing a pile up of 30,000 shipping containers.

I bet both attacks were carried out by teenage computer whizzes half a world away. It’s frightening that a kid with a keyboard can paralyze the world’s largest companies.

Cyberattacks are a huge problem with no permanent solution.

But remember: “Pessimists sound smart; optimists make money.”

Instead of dwelling on how hackers can light a portfolio on fire, we bet on the companies fighting back. We own one of America’s fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in Disruption Investor.

Its stock has more than doubled this year, and there’s plenty of upside left.

Whatever you do, avoid this death cult.

Is it okay to have kids when the world around us is burning?

That’s the question posed by The New Yorker magazine.

There’s so much wrong with this I don’t know where to begin.

First off, kids rock. Teaching my daughter to spell and bringing my son to football are literally the happiest times of my week. It’s the same for any dad I talk with.

Second, the world is not burning. By practically every metric, the world has never been a better place.

One example: In 1900, 1% of American women giving birth died in labor. Today, the five-year mortality rate for localized breast cancer is 1.2%.

Being pregnant 100 years ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

Not having kids because of “climate change” is dumb.

It’s just as silly as the folks who didn’t procreate because they read The Population Bomb, which predicted mass famine due to overpopulation in the 1960s.

Yes, we’ve seen this movie before.

Here’s a comment published in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. Sadly, this guy bought into the death cult idea and now has big regrets.

Source: WSJ