Excellent reflexions in this long term view.

Have you ever talked about investing in the Graphene potential?

I have a friend convinced that the cost of producing it will come down with some innovation. And it could substitute or complement copper supply.

Eoin Treacy's view

Thank you for this question which may be of interest to the Collective. I have been thinking a lot about the genesis of bull market themes. Good ideas often don’t come from nowhere. It takes a long time for product ideas to reach fruition.

For example, Mark Cuban’s first venture was Broadcast.com in 1998. Then Enron signed a deal with Blockbuster video to begin a video on demand service in 2001. Both ventures failed in epic fashion.

Netflix began by mail ordering in 1997 and only adopted streaming in 2007. That was nine years between the first attempt at streaming and the big success story everyone is familiar with. However, the model was only possible because of the growth of the internet and improving connection speeds and accessibility.

Today, every broadcaster has embraced some form of streaming which highlights that it is the interest is the enabler and no company has a defensible moat without killer content at an acceptable cost.

Graphene has been described as a wonder material for at least the last decade. Related stocks have gone through a least one significant bull market; fuelled by enthusiasm about an imminent breakthrough in commercialisation of advanced manufacturing techniques.

Versarien was among the best performers in the sector during the 2018 bout of enthusiasm but has since given up the entire bull market.

Canada’s Gratomic is setting production records in producing graphite and the share exhibits base formation characteristics.

One of the challenges for investing in a 2-D structures is you don’t need a whole lot of the material to supplement whatever product one is building. It is quite likely that the biggest beneficiaries of a graphene economy will be product designers rather than miners.