Don’t believe the pessimists – we’re still creating incredible new technologies

published 11 November 2014

141111-nasdaq — Tech stocks: plenty to get excited about

Here's something interesting.

When we talk about US markets, we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the S&P 500, or the Dow Jones. Both of those surpassed their previous highs quite some time ago.

But there's one major US index that's yet to return to its 2000 peak the technology-heavy Nasdaq index.

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That suggests to me that despite all the enthusiasm for various exciting new technological sectors and buzzwords, there's still potential for investors to get more excited.

But what's the best way to invest?

Technology could be the way out of our economic problems

As Merryn told attendees at the MoneyWeek workshop on Saturday (if you missed it, you can pick up the audio at a bargain discount price here), there are lots of things to fret about in the global economy.

There's all that debt still to pay off. There's all that money printing. And there's the fact that we don't know how it'll all unravel.

But on the flipside, there are plenty of things to be immensely excited about. New technology from roboticsto financial disintermediation'to medical breakthroughs to renewable energy, promises to change our lives significantly for the better, and provide massive investment opportunities in the years to come.

A lot of this has been recognised by investors already. The leading consumer smart' device company Apple has become one of the biggest companies in the world. Biotech stockshave been in a rampant bull market for some time. Buzzwords like crowdfunding' and the internet of things' are everyday jargon now.

Yet it's interesting to see that despite the excitement over technology, the US Nasdaq index which demonstrated the hubris of the 2000 bubble and bust better than any other market is yet to regain its highs from back then.

It's not far off it now. And the Nasdaq is very different to what it was in 2000 there are far fewer stocks (roughly half as many, at 2,500) and it's not stuffed with speculative, earnings-free nonsense these days. It doesn't reflect early-stage enthusiasm so much as established, in some cases even dull, sector giants.

But as one of the mainstream indices that's most associated with brave new' eras, it's interesting to see that it has lagged the wider markets, rather than leaped ahead.

Amid all the talk of secular stagnation' and a lot of hand-wringing about how we've stopped coming up with world-changing ideas, perhaps that's not surprising. But it does suggest that there remains room for investors to be convinced that we can, in fact, still come up with transformational technologies.

And as last week's MoneyWeek cover story from Jim Mellon shows, we can there's plenty to get very excited about indeed.

How to invest in early-stage technology

The trickiest thing about investing in new-fangled technology is that the area is chock-full of jam tomorrow' companies and story' stocks. Clearly, the dotcom boom is the archetypal example of this.

The big picture story was right. The internet did change the world and the way we do business. And it still is arguably we're still only in the early stages of that transformation, and understanding its long-term impact will take even longer.

(Incidentally, it may be hard to remember in our era of ubiquitous wifi and email, but plenty of people were sceptics about the value of the internet. In 1998, Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman suggested that it would have no more impact on the global economy than the fax machine and he was by no means the only one.)

So the trend was absolutely correct. But investing in it was a very different matter. The majority of dotcom stocks went bust. And even the successful ones had some very trying times. I'd be interested to know if anyone who bought Amazon in 1999 managed to hang on to it to this day, for example.

As an investor, it can be very frustrating. You get all excited by the fantastic, world-changing potential of the overall theme, but then find it nigh on impossible to invest in it without taking frankly ludicrous levels of risk.

The solution of course, is to invest in a spread of companies. When we cover these sorts of sectors in MoneyWeek magazine, we like to give a range of tips, plus ideally a fund or exchange-traded fund that tracks the area.

But my colleague Dr Mike Tubbs who specialises in finding companies with established track records of successfully investing in research and development to generate profits for their shareholders has another suggestion.

He's currently very excited about an opportunity to invest in these sorts of companies at the earliest stages of their development without taking quite the same extreme levels of risk as a venture capitalist, for example. You can find out more in his report on the topic here.

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.