The next great technological revolution - Biotech

[jimmy olsen]

Again, I think you are wrong. People have made mad money off of biotechs...and there are biotech companies like (Amgen) which are worth tens of billions.  That said, it is true that they haven't overtaken pharmas, though in many cases that's because biotech startups develop products and then sell them off to pharmas (or pharma just buys them out right like Millenium-Takeda or Roche-Genentech).

IBM and other computer companies were making plenty of money in the 70s even though the Digital Revolution hadn't really begun yet. Amgen is the IBM of the Biotech revolution.

[Razgovory]

IBM was making a lot of cash in the 1920's.  It's almost a hundred years old.

[OttoVonBismarck]

You're talking out of your ass while drunk, that's okay.

I find it shocking when someone deliberately disobeys me. Despite you immoral lifestyle I have not had your blinded nor scourged as custom dictate, and this is the thanks you give me?

[garbon]

I'm not into S&M play.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Again, I think you are wrong. People have made mad money off of biotechs...and there are biotech companies like (Amgen) which are worth tens of billions.  That said, it is true that they haven't overtaken pharmas, though in many cases that's because biotech startups develop products and then sell them off to pharmas (or pharma just buys them out right like Millenium-Takeda or Roche-Genentech).

IBM and other computer companies were making plenty of money in the 70s even though the Digital Revolution hadn't really begun yet. Amgen is the IBM of the Biotech revolution.

That's sort of what I was trying to say. For a long time, computers were a profitable industry but with limited application. The very largest companies would use them to replace certain highly labor intensive functions, for example. But from an investing perspective if you put your money behind anyone other than IBM for the first oh, 25 years of computer use it's highly unlikely you made a lot of money. The only companies that really were able to compete against IBM and not fold were companies that had large and extant product lines, and they only were able to compete because the rest of their business made them profitable enough to keep producing competition to IBM at a loss. Or you had companies like Cray that built extremely specialized types of computers. Even Intel, founded in the late 60s, was not a great performer til the Wintel marriage and resulting explosion in home PC purchases.

Not all people were shocked when technology became a much bigger sector of the economy, it had been predicted by many for a long time. But it didn't happen overnight, people think the 1990s and late 80s IT explosion came out of nowhere, but it didn't. Commercialized computing activity dates back to the 50s and for the first 30 years or so the computer industry was more akin to the kind of business say, Texas Instruments or some other company is in. A specialized electronic controls business that provided advanced products to a small group of customers. If you actually look at stock market returns annualized, the 1990s were a massive eruption in activity and profitability for IT companies unlike what had come before. Garbon seems to think that has already happened with biotech, when it has not. Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple all existed before the huge explosion in IT, that doesn't mean you trace that explosion in activity's beginnings back to the founding of those companies.

Garbon probably does not read market news at all, but if he did, he'd know that what investors want/expect some day is the sort of explosive, sector wide multplicative growth like we saw in the IT industry out of biotech. That means seeing your investment, double, triple, or more in a few years time. In IT some of that was the result of a speculative bubble forming, but some of it was real growth. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle, when they started to fully hit the ground running were legitimately growing very quickly in terms of earnings, revenue etc and their explosive share price growth was largely justified.

What finally sent IT in that direction was the "democratization" of their product, it went from being a niche product that cost a lot of money to something that was part of everyone's daily personal lives and part of virtually every business. That has not happened with biotechnology, if it ever does, it will represent a massive increase in customer base for that industry and the resulting boom will produce extreme growth year to year--which has not been seen yet. The idea that "people have made a lot of money off of biotech" as evidence this has happened is asinine. Companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft etc had made millionaires long before the IT boom started.

[The Brain]

I just came out of nowhere.

[garbon]

Garbon probably does not read market news at all, but if he did, he'd know that what investors want/expect some day is the sort of explosive, sector wide multplicative growth like we saw in the IT industry out of biotech. That means seeing your investment, double, triple, or more in a few years time. In IT some of that was the result of a speculative bubble forming, but some of it was real growth. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle, when they started to fully hit the ground running were legitimately growing very quickly in terms of earnings, revenue etc and their explosive share price growth was largely justified.

Who cares? Investors want all kind of shit, especially bubbles where they can make lots of money.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think everyone knows eventually biotech is going to take off, but we've known that since the 90s and a lot of people have lost a lot of money assuming "its time is now." Even if its time is now, your chances of picking the Microsoft or Google out of the bunch is very low.

Biotechs make lots of money and have already changed lots of things.

Some have made lots of money, some have treaded water and some have lost money and even gone under.
Trick is to distinguish between those in advance.