To Mars in the Next Decade?

Editor’s Note: “Market Wizard” Larry Benedict warned his readers about the 2020 and 2022 crashes. And he had one of the best years of his career helping his clients profit in 2008.

Now he’s offering a new prediction… but it’s not a crash.

Right now, he sees a key market indicator flashing red. It warns a “chaos period” could hit as soon as November 7 – two days after the upcoming election. And if you’re relying on traditional investing methods like buy-and-hold, your portfolio could suffer during the coming volatility.

That’s why Larry’s putting together an event called Countdown to Chaos. And on October 30, he’ll offer a blueprint for how you can protect your capital… and even thrive during the coming market chaos.

If you haven’t yet put this event on your calendar, take a moment to do so now. You can register right here.

AlphaFold to Reverse Alzheimer’s?

Dear Jeff,

Promis Neuroscience has been working on a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease focusing on misfolded beta-amyloid. Do you think AlphaFold technology could be used, essentially in reverse, to discover the exact amino acid sequences causing this misfolding? Could this lead to a more effective treatment?

Thanks.

– Robin D.

Hi, Robin,

I took a quick look at ProMIS Neurosciences (PMN), which is a publicly traded company. Its approach is to identify misfolded proteins that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. Once it identifies a misfolded protein, ProMIS hopes to design a novel antibody that will bind to a specific area of the misfolded protein and eliminate the toxic proteins from the brain.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold technology could definitely be trained to predict misfolded proteins in a similar way to how it was trained to accurately predict correctly folded proteins. I do not know if that is a project that DeepMind is working on or not. But it would be a logical area for AlphaFold to be enhanced.

Obviously, with AlphaFold, this could be done at scale and would be a great benefit to the industry developing therapies – for not just neurological diseases. The benefits would be much broader. I hope DeepMind does that.

As for ProMIS, I haven’t done a deep dive into their technology, so I don’t have an opinion on the chances of success. They have one therapy in Phase 1 clinical trials for an antibody designed to bind to a toxic amyloid-beta oligomer. They hope that binding to the toxic amyloid-beta oligomer will eliminate the toxic protein from the brain and slow down Alzheimer’s.

This is a tiny microcap company with no notable institutional investors. It has an enterprise value of $17.6 million, is very unprofitable, and is burning through cash. It has very limited resources. So much so that it has to continually go out to the market and conduct secondary offerings to raise capital on a regular basis. It has already done so twice this year, and it will need more cash soon. Every time these secondary offerings take place, the share price drops due to the dilution.

In the absence of a major breakthrough, companies like this suffer, especially in a market environment like we have today.

Protecting Your Wealth

Dear Brownstone Team,

Greetings from Munich, Germany! I have been a subscriber for over a year and must say your work is not only excellent, but it also helped me make some handsome gains in the stock market. Wonderful!

I saw Jeff answering some subscriber Qs and here would be mine…

How could I protect my newly gained wealth from a potential economic crisis (not just a short-term downturn) that could take stocks years to recover from?

Sell a portion and invest in property? That would be too expensive. Gold is too highly priced now. Bonds don’t perform like shares and aren’t safe either unless they’re government bonds. Don’t do anything and tough it out if it happens?

I’d really appreciate your advice.

 – Eckhard W.

Hello, Eckhard,

It’s great to have you on board with us. I was just in Munich at the end of April this year. I always enjoy my visits.

Unfortunately, I am unable to provide any kind of individualized investment advice. Each investor is different. For a financial advisor to provide advice, they would need to have a complete picture of your financial status, financial goals, and risk tolerance.

And your question speaks to asset allocation, which again can be different from one investor to another. Several things impact this: their goals, their stage in life, and whether they are looking for income or growth, for example.

My team and I work tirelessly to analyze and track our model portfolio companies. For most of our research products, we also use volatility-adjusted stop losses to protect against any falls that are outside of an individual stock’s normal volatility. If we feel that a stock has become overvalued, we often issue a sell alert when that happens to protect profits.

With our model portfolios, we also make adjustments over time depending on economic conditions. For example, in 2022 in the Near Future Report, we recommended some downside protection through an ETF to hedge the portfolio because we were concerned that it would decline.

In Exponential Tech Investor during that same window – when small-capitalization stocks were completely out of favor – we employed a strategy of investing in the undervalued corporate bonds of high-tech companies. This was something that I called X-bonds. It was an extremely effective and very profitable strategy at the time despite the terrible market conditions.

And I am currently in my “laboratory,” working on a new AI-powered research product that will enable us to trade on volatility, especially when market conditions are weak or bearish. It’s my answer to what we can do to make money when things are ugly.

My high-level goal with my investment research products is to have a portfolio of fantastic research, something that will be useful to all of my subscribers no matter where they are in their investment journey, in life, and no matter what kind of market conditions. I want to make sure that we always have something that is valuable and able to perform well in whatever market conditions.

And if my team and I ever felt that we were in for a major crash, we won’t hesitate to recommend that our subscribers close out all positions at risk and step aside for a period of time.

Checking in on Editas

Dear Brownstone Research Team,

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for all the exceptional work you do. We are particularly eager to hear any feedback or updates regarding Editas Medicine, the gene-editing company that Jeff Brown has been very optimistic about.

With CRISPR’s revolutionary potential to address genetic mutations and cure diseases, Jeff’s outlook on Editas Medicine’s advancements, such as the development of in vivo and ex vivo genomic medicines, is truly exciting.

Could you share more on the latest developments, trials, or applications for Editas Medicine and Jeff’s projections for its impact in the coming years? We deeply appreciate your insights.

Thanks again for all the hard work and research you provide!

Yours sincerely,

 – Heidi B.

Hello, Heidi,

We are providing regular updates on Editas Medicine (EDIT) in our Exponential Tech Investor monthly portfolio updates. I recommend that you follow the developments there.

The latest developments are exciting, as Editas continues to financially benefit from its intellectual property licensing. Editas’ underlying patents have prevailed in multiple court rulings with regard to the foundational CRISPR genetic editing technology.

The company is in late-stage clinical trials for an ex vivo therapy for sickle cell and beta thalassemia, which has the potential to be best-in-class. It is looking to license those therapies out to a larger company that will commercialize them immediately after FDA approval.

A key focus has become the holy grail of genetic editing, which is an in vivo therapy that is injected directly into a patient. In vivo is the lowest cost to administer and the most convenient for the patient, and it appears that Editas has been making great progress on that front for the same diseases.

This is life-changing technology, and it’s so exciting for us to have a front-row seat for these developments.

The Timeline to Mars

Wow, can’t believe all the advances taking place in this “space.” Do you feel as though we could be traveling to Mars within the next decade? If so, how would the forces at play play into this scenario?

– Kumiko O.

Hello Kumiko,

I can tell you with 100% certainty that there will be a crewed mission to Mars within the next decade. 100%. No question about it.

What’s so incredible about the aerospace industry and space exploration right now is that it is no longer entirely controlled by governments. Yes, China’s and Russia’s governments still control their space programs; but that’s no longer true in the U.S.

SpaceX changed everything. Its commercial success in launching payloads into orbit has afforded it the ability to conduct research and development that historically was controlled by the U.S. government.

A perfect example is the latest developments with SpaceX’s Starship, which we enjoyed in The Bleeding Edge – The “Impossible” Catch.

The Starship is the spacecraft that will get us to Mars – much sooner than anyone realizes. The progress with Starship, as we’ve been tracking, has been nothing short of remarkable. This is very encouraging for SpaceX’s plans to get to Mars very soon.

In fact, assuming SpaceX keeps up its pace, it plans on launching an uncrewed Starship to Mars to test the landing on the surface of Mars. Assuming those landings go well, the first crewed mission will happen in the 2028/2029 timeframe.

From my perspective, the biggest risk is no longer technical. It is political. The current administration has already intentionally and punitively attacked Musk and his businesses. Depending on what happens in the upcoming election, that could become a much bigger problem for Musk and his teams… or it could become a tailwind. I believe the outcome will be very binary.

But assuming no political obstacles, Musk and his team will be free to innovate and send not just a test Starship to Mars but one that is carrying a payload full of materials and equipment that will eventually be used on the Red Planet.

I’m ridiculously excited that we’re going to be able to witness this in the next few years.

よろしくお願いいたします

For the Betterment of Humanity

Good day to Team Brownstone and Jeff,

Thank you for all that you all do to keep us updated on the fast-paced changing technologies. China is said to have used a Canadian quantum computer to successfully break two encryption methodologies.

Which would be better for us humans: Success in achieving “AGI” or Quantum Computing?

Are we humans making the same mistakes we did with EVs? Your opinion (please) would be appreciated! Again, thanks for all that you do for us!

– Gordian B.

Hello Gordian,

Your question was a hot topic this week in The Bleeding Edge. I covered this in depth in Did China Crack U.S. Military-Grade Encryption? Definitely worth a read.

As for your other question, achieving AGI is far better for society than quantum computing (if I had to choose one). AGI will give humanity a productivity boom far larger than anything else we’ve seen in history. And it will improve our quality of life and improve products and services in nearly every industry imaginable.

And when we incorporate AGI with advanced robotics, we have even greater possibilities.

Quantum computing will benefit the world by solving extremely complex problem sets, ones so complex that no supercomputer on Earth could solve in any reasonable amount of time.

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose. Both technologies are being built in parallel, and they are both on similar time scales. There’s a chance that we’ll have a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer in the 2026/2027 timeframe, around the time that I’m predicting we’ll have our breakthrough in AGI.

If I had to pick which will happen first, I’d say AGI for sure.

As for EVs, once all of our baseload electricity production is clean (nuclear fission and fusion), EVs will make a lot of sense. And most autonomous vehicles will be EVs, so as autonomy takes off, so will EV production.

If you haven’t done so already, I recommend reading yesterday’s Bleeding Edge – The Advent of Autonomy, which is highly relevant to this topic.

Thanks for writing in.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful weekend.

Regards,

Jeff