Where Can I Invest in Nanotechnology?

Video Transcript

"The first thing I think it's only safe to warn people about, is that new technologies and new, exciting kinds of science, often make some people very large amounts of money, but generally not as early as you think. So there's a general belief that if something new is coming, like the space age or the electronics age, whatever, the sooner you get into the sector, the more money you will make. And this isn't true. A lot of the people, for example, who right in....right at the beginning, the railway age in the 1830's lost large amounts of money. It's certainly not the case that the sooner you get into a new sector, the more money you make. The other thing that you need to do is actually understand what nanotechnology is. Nano is a prefix which means one billionth, or one thousand millionth, and nanotechnology is very simply the idea of building both very, very small things, like small robots that might swim around inside your body and mend tissues. Or building materials that you can see in the normal world, like pieces of plastic, or things that look like wood, or pieces of metal, but which are assembled atom by atom. So nanotechnology is the idea of doing things an atom at a time, and one of the difficulties is that it's technology in search of an application. And you are more likely to make money by investing in a successful use of the idea than the idea itself. There are a lot of nanotechnology companies out there that might not make money. They might be building pieces of equipment that are used to assemble materials atom by atom, but the people who make money are the people who find the novel uses or the novel applications. I'll just quickly give you two examples of fantastic technologies which have not made the money that people thought they would. One is biotechnology, which in the late '80s everybody was expecting to be the next big thing. A lot of people lost money on that. It's definitely going to be important when it happens, it will be huge, but it's very, very hard to simply just chuck some money into one or two companies and expect to increase your investment many fold. You might choose the wrong one. You have to learn a lot. Another example is what you might call "solid faxing", what these days tends to be called "rapid prototyping". And these are machines that are a bit like fax machines, but which can build three dimensional models. That's to say, you stick an object, like a key, into the machine somewhere in Hawaii, and it gets sent round the world. And in Argentina, a similar machine actually builds a three dimensional copy of the key. It's a fantastic technology, and people have had a lot of money....a lot of trouble making money out of it. Because so far, it's....people have not found how to sell it, what to use it for. Nanotechnology is similar. It will undoubtably transform medicine, engineering, everything, but it's not going to be easy to make make money out of it. So be careful. Learn as much as you can about the companies, and inform yourself about nanotechnology. Don't just chuck cash in the direction of anybody who has nano on the front of their company name. So, be careful and good luck."