As a Long-termer I consider each share like buying an acre of land. A good friend of mine from Japan bought up lots of land heading towards the Gold Coast and sold it 20 years later for an incredible return. He let the Population come to him and like that I let the market come to me.
I have done really well going against the market and buying low - the quintessential essence of Value Investing. I see options as a good strategy for some but I would rather own and let the limits of the Dirt tell their tale.
It is like Macro Drivers - More and more people are using these measures because they rely upon some strong Mathematics.
For instance there is a strong link between the growth of a nation and the growth of small caps. There is many Macro Drivers that are simple like Tourism and Investment ... also looking for Signposts like the proposed Casino in Sri Lanka. We cannot spend Hundreds of thousands on research but we can piggy back. A friend of mine would buy properties around MacDonald's, piggy backing on their research!
Macro Drivers are built upon really simple Logic Chains.....
1/ Who is the World Leader in Graphite/Graphene?
2/ China is the World Leader in Graphite/Graphene.
3/ What nations are China seeking to ensure Said Dominance? Where is the world's Premium Graphite?
4/ Sri Lanka is the Hub and was the world leader of Graphite/Graphene.
5/ What is an example of Chinese Investment?
6/ Sri Lanka is a Hub of Chinese Trade; Security and Graphite... For Instance the Port Investment/Maritime Silk Road.
7/ How many Nations are flocking to Sri Lanka?
8/ Many Nations realize Sri Lanka's position and are exerting their Soft Power and Influence. For example; Australia.
Just look at the Investment Drivers and compare them to other Graphiters...
I cannot speak much about daily ups and downs of an irrational Market but I do anticipate it doubling Talga at a minimum sooner rather then later for many many reasons but my Logic does not a re-rate make!!!
Antifragile is a term coined by Nicholas Nasseem Taleb to describe a business that benefits from the shocks of new technologies, also known as “Black Swans” – those unpredicted breakthroughs that cause CEOs to wake up in a cold sweat and investors to get cold feet.
Black Swans and antifragility may soon become a hot topic in the world of graphene production, where competition is rapidly intensifying.
Digging up graphene down under
Talga – Digging Up
Graphene?
While most of the first wave of graphene producers are working on scaling up production and developing markets, there are big changes afoot, and a new wave of competition emerging.
Many of the existing players have complex production techniques developed almost a decade ago, they have now been joined in the market by a group of Australian mining companies who have found a way to simply dig graphene out of the ground (almost). Their approach involves starting with some very high quality graphite, which is easy to exfoliate into graphene without the need for complicated processing.
Unlike most pure play graphene producers, the Aussie miners are simply adding value to an existing asset, putting them in a less fragile position. If the market for graphene doesn’t reach expectations, they have a safety net in the global market for high quality graphite, a material that never seems to go out of fashion.
Here comes the real graphene?
Of course the real interest in graphene comes from the properties of the single layer material, rather than the graphene flakes produced by exfoliating graphite. As with any new material at this stage, there is little in the way of standard terminology, and materials supplied as “graphene” differ greatly – from true single layer material, to complete junk described as graphene on the premise that it contains layers of carbon atoms.
The problem with the single layer material is that it is difficult to produce in volume, as it requires the costly chemical vapour deposition (CVD) process. While CVD works well for high value products such as semiconductors, it is less well suited for lower value applications, which gives the exfoliated graphite based materials the advantage in both price and volume, for now.
This may change in the near future as continuous graphene production gets ever closer. This is a key component of the EU Graphene Flagship, with Spain’s Graphenea making solid progress in scaling up production.
The new method “promises to enable continuous production, using a thin metal foil as a substrate, in an industrial process where the material would be deposited onto the foil as it smoothly moves from one spool to another. The resulting sheets would be limited in size only by the width of the rolls of foil and the size of the chamber where the deposition would take place.”
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who have their own roll-to-roll process, have perhaps gone a step further, fabricating composites by CVD. Meanwhile UK companies 2D-Tech and Cambridge Nanosystems have recently announced plans to scale up new graphene production methods.
The Black Swans seem to be multiplying.
Antifragility, just for miners and entrepreneurs?
From the perspective of end users, building an antifragile business based on graphene has never been easier. There are a few good ones here based on applications of both graphene and graphene oxide. As with nanotechnology, prices and analytical equipment can provide a decent opportunity too。
“During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.” Mark Twain
Production techniques are advancing quickly, promising dramatic improvements in both cost and quality.
Graphene producers locked into propriety production technologies will have to watch their backs. Anyone with a cash pile (or access to one) should be looking to lock in customers quickly, or acquire new technologies to fight off the rising tide of competition.
Everybody else needs to keep a sharp lookout for Black Swans.