Dear Reader,
I know of no better way to build generational wealth as an investor than investing at the earliest stages in private companies.
But this is a secret shared by very few. Even wealthy individuals with a net worth of $1 million only allocate 6% of their investable assets into private deals. That’s better than nothing, but not much at all.
Yet look what happens to that percentage when we step up to more sophisticated investors:
Ultra-high-net-worth investors ($25M+) allocate 42% of investments into private deals.
Family offices allocate 46% of investments into private deals.
Endowments allocate 55% of investments into private deals.
It’s almost as if it’s a private club. If you’re not in it, you simply won’t know about these kinds of investments. And largely this is no one’s fault – except the government’s for not allowing normal investors to have access to these lucrative investment opportunities.
But thanks to a major change in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations, that has started to change. And I’m excited because that means I can help bring the world of private investing to my subscribers so that they’re “in” on the secret. In fact, I intend to be a catalyst for this movement.
This has been a goal of mine for the last six and a half years, and I’m almost there. And now I have a favor to ask. It won’t take more than a minute of your time.
I have a super short survey about private investing. Just a quick five questions. It will better help me understand your perspectives and experience, and it will help me improve the research and product that I’ve been dreaming to build.
I’d be grateful if you took a minute to fill it out. I promise it’ll just take one minute – please click here.
Relativity Space just hit a major milestone. The company’s Terran 1 rocket just passed its Stage-1 flight tests. This keeps the rocket on track for its first demonstration launch in early 2022. We are just months away…
We have talked about Relativity Space a few times before. To bring new readers up to speed, this company uses large-scale 3D metal printing to make its rockets. In fact, 3D printing produces 90% of the Terran 1 rocket’s dry mass.
Here’s a shot of the rocket’s 3D-printed nose cone in the lab:
3D-Printed Rocket Nose Cone
Source: Relativity Space
And get this – Relativity Space can manufacture each rocket in about 30 days. From there, each rocket needs to go through about 30 days of flight testing before it is ready for launch.
That means Relativity Space can go from raw material to flight in just 60 days. That’s unheard of in the industry. Naturally, this reduces the cost of each launch tremendously.
What’s more, the Terran 1 can carry up to 1,250 kilograms (kg) into low earth orbit. That means it can get some large payloads up into space.
So Relativity Space is in a position to launch significant payloads into orbit at a lower cost than anyone else in the industry. That makes it a potential competitor to SpaceX in a portion of the launch services industry, presuming its demonstration launch goes well in a few months.
For this reason, Relativity Space is now the second most valuable private space tech company in the world. It’s valued at $4.2 billion.
Only SpaceX, with its $74 billion valuation, is worth more. It’s a big gap between the two, but Relativity is still a significant player with great promise.
Needless to say, I’m very excited about the upcoming launch of Terran 1. That will be a very big deal for the industry.
And if successful, we can absolutely expect Relativity Space to go public within the next 12 months or so. The early stage launch industry has leaned heavily towards accessing the public markets through reverse mergers with SPACs. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Relativity do the same.
Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division DeepMind made a major breakthrough around predicting how proteins fold back in July. We talked about how this would create a new golden age for biotechnology by accelerating the drug discovery and development process.
Well, DeepMind just came through with yet another incredible breakthrough. This time, it’s around gene expression. I’ll explain with a little background…
Our DNA determines what proteins our bodies produce. And proteins are responsible for every function a living organism’s body performs. They are the building blocks of life.
Gene expression refers to the process where information from our DNA triggers the production of a specific protein. And if we understand how our DNA influences gene expression, we can predict how the body will respond to other factors, including disease.
The problem is, only 2% of our DNA contains information about how to produce proteins. The other 98% is called “non-coding” DNA because it does not contain direct information on proteins.
However, our non-coding DNA is not useless. It still influences gene expression… We just don’t know exactly how.
And that’s where DeepMind comes in.
DeepMind applied a form of AI called Transformers to DNA analysis. This technology is typically used for natural language processing. It’s good at looking ahead at long passages of text and using that context to understand a given word or phrase.
And it turns out this approach works great for DNA as well.
DeepMind used a Transformers model to analyze both coding and non-coding DNA at the same time. The information from the non-coding DNA gave the AI context so it could more accurately predict gene expression under a given circumstance.
What’s so amazing here is that this is the first time we have been able to infer any significant information from non-coding DNA. In fact, there was a time when non-coding DNA was considered “junk DNA” because it was thought to be useless.
So this is an incredible breakthrough. And we can pair this with DeepMind’s breakthrough around protein folding to gain much greater insight into how the human body works… and how we can develop therapies that will help our bodies fight and cure disease.
A golden age of biotechnology has already started. We are no more than one or two decades away from curing all human disease of genetic origin.
And what’s so crazy about this is that we have a group of computer scientists, not doctors or physicians, at DeepMind to thank for some of the biggest medical breakthroughs in history.
This is a perfect example of the power of AI and biotech working together… And there are sure to be incredible investment opportunities alongside the amazing medical discoveries. If you’d like to learn more about my current top recommendation at the center of this convergence, you can find out the details right here.
Google just announced that it is canceling its plans to launch what the company calls Plex Banking services. This is a smart move…
A few years ago, Google released plans to provide checking and savings accounts that paired up with its Google Pay digital wallet. The idea was to simplify banking and provide these services for free.
It was a big announcement initially. And it was seen as a threat to the traditional banking industry because of Google’s scale and its ability to advertise for free. The banks worried that Google would pull a lot of customers away from them.
But now Google has decided to cancel the idea… at least for now. The company blamed the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that it lost several key people involved in the Plex Banking project.
I don’t believe that explanation for a second.
Google is a company with nearly endless resources. It can afford to hire anybody on the planet to oversee the banking project.
Plus, Google thrived during the pandemic. Its revenues soared, its gross margins expanded, and its free cash flow over the last two years has more than doubled.
So this is a phony explanation.
What really happened is Google has been closely monitoring what Facebook has been going through after announcing plans to launch its own digital currency and digital wallet.
That was akin to kicking the hornet’s nest of regulatory bodies in the U.S. and around the world. Facebook came under all kinds of regulatory scrutiny as a result.
Google took note of this and realized that it would likely get the same treatment if it moved forward with the Plex Banking services.
I’m sure this was a hard decision, but it was the right one. Why risk the existing business when it’s doing so well?
And to me, this is good news for consumers as well.
As we have discussed before, any time a company advertises a product as “free,” that means the consumer is the product. And that’s absolutely true for Google’s Plex Banking services.
Google would surveil and track every transaction that flowed through its customers’ accounts. That would give it greater insight into people’s income levels and their spending habits.
Then Google would package this information up and sell access to it to advertisers and anyone else willing to pay for it. This would have taken Google’s poor privacy practices to another level.
That said, I bet that Google won’t give up on this project entirely.
Instead, the company will stay quiet until the regulatory environment isn’t as edgy. It will let Facebook, and perhaps others, clear the way.
Then when things settle down, Google will make another push towards offering financial services and gaining even more access to our personal spending and earning information.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
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The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
