Welcome to our weekly mailbag edition of The Bleeding Edge. All week, you submitted your questions about the biggest trends in technology. Today, I’ll do my best to answer them.
If you have a question you’d like answered next week, be sure you submit it right here.
My advice to all the parents reading this
First up is a great question about how bleeding-edge technology will impact the careers of the future…
Hi, Jeff. Thanks for your great work. I have benefited greatly from it. My question concerns my son’s occupation, which is coding. I wonder how the coming changes will affect him. Does he need to be training for new technology?
– Michael P.
Thanks for writing in, Michael. I love seeing questions like these. As a parent myself, I am always thinking about how I can best empower my children for the future that they will inherit.
If I had to offer one piece of advice, I’d encourage your son to expand his education in computer science to include specialization in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) programming. One of the best career paths over the next couple of decades will be with AI/ML.
Hiring specialists in AI/ML has proven difficult. The below chart gives you an idea of what I mean.
What we see above is the number of AI job postings per million jobs (the blue line) compared to the number of AI job searches per million jobs (the gray line).
In short, there are about 2.9 times more jobs than there are applicants in this industry. That’s how hot the market is. And this gap is widening.
The universities are trying to catch up. Leaders like MIT and Stanford have more students interested in their AI/ML courses than there are seats in the classrooms. And Carnegie Mellon just became the first to offer an undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, which it kicked off last fall.
Furthermore, MIT announced that it’s investing $1 billion in an AI college in an effort to produce graduates who know how to apply AI/ML to other disciplines.
The field is so in demand that AI/ML specialists with little or no industry experience can expect to make between $300-500k per year (in salary and stock) on average.
Half a million dollars right out of school… with no work experience. With experience, the numbers get even more impressive – oftentimes into the $1 million-plus range.
And there are even more alternatives for gaining skills to make yourself attractive to employers in this space…
One of the major trends of the future of education will be the concept of “nanodegrees.” We can think of these as highly specialized skills teaching very specific techniques. This could become something that we do on a frequent basis – perhaps earning a nanodegree every few years.
There is a company called Udacity that I really like. It offers courses that lead to nanodegrees. And it specializes in AI/ML technology.
It also offers nanodegrees in autonomous driving technology, data sciences, computer vision, deep learning, and natural language processing.
This is a great alternative to a full bachelor’s or master’s degree.
My mission for readers…
Next up, one of my paid-up subscribers has a question about a recent recommendation…
Hey Jeff, I just lost 5% of my portfolio on a big bet I made on your direct recommendation to buy [recommendation] prior to its earnings call. I understand that [it] beat earnings and a lot of this is market sentiment, but I’m still very disappointed in this call. Just wanted to let ya know; I still appreciate all of the work you do. Have a good one, man.
– Royce J.
Thanks for writing in, Royce. I’m glad I have the chance to answer this one for all my readers.
Our mission with The Near Future Report is to invest in large-capitalization technology companies that are still in “growth mode.” These are “sleep well at night” stocks that will secure us market-beating returns year after year. And that’s precisely what we’ve done.
Even with the market volatility this week, our average return in the portfolio is 24.2%. Compare that to the average annual return from the S&P 500… about 8%. Not to mention, we successfully invested in the No. 1 performing S&P stock last year.
You’re correct that my recent 5G recommendation beat on revenue during its recent earnings call. But the company also offered cautious growth projections for a key part of its business. Wall Street didn’t like this.
But this is a typical overreaction to short-term news. We’re interested in securing long-term gains that crush the market. The Near Future Report is not a speculative trading service; it is an investment research service. This is an important distinction.
The goal isn’t to get in and out quickly. My mission is to get my investors in at a great price and then hold that stock for at least 12 months so that investors are capturing long-term capital gains.
One thing that concerns me is that you placed a “big bet” on one position. We don’t bet in The Near Future Report. We invest. And I always recommend proper position sizing in portfolio companies.
This means that Near Future Report investors should invest the same amount in every recommendation… This is important for portfolio management and risk management.
What’s important is that the longer-term thesis for the company is still intact. It is an essential part of the 5G network build-out. It will come back strong. And we can enjoy a dividend while we wait for our capital gains to kick in.
If paid-up readers haven’t read my most recent recommendation, go right here. And if you’re not a reader, then you can join us here.
No, this tech isn’t a threat to 5G
Last is a question about the 5G rollout…
In your comments regarding 5G implementation, are you purposely avoiding HaloFi? It seems to me that this is a much less costly option, and it will make it much easier to bring 5G to rural areas, especially those with terrain issues.
– Martin K.
Thanks for the question, Martin.
I must admit, you had me stumped… I had never heard of HaloFi.
Thanks to my team and a little digging… we discovered that “HaloFi” is a term some other analysts have used to describe internet communications via satellite. HaloFi isn’t actually the name of a technology… It’s just a silly moniker.
We discussed this briefly last month when we looked at Elon Musk’s Starlink project. What I mentioned then is true now. Satellite internet services are no threat to 5G. And just to be clear, they have nothing to do with 5G technology.
When we use a satellite internet service, latency can be a half a second or more. It might not sound like much, but the delays can be significant. And consumers will never get 100 megabits per second to the home over a satellite service. Streaming video to a television, for example, would be quite difficult.
I want to be clear about something here. Satellite companies that plan to offer internet connectivity to your home will make bold claims about performance. The private “HaloFi” company you’re likely thinking of claimed it can deliver 400 Mbps download speeds at low latency and that it had demonstrated that in Korea already.
Here’s the catch…
The company had to dedicate an inordinate amount of bandwidth to just one single “customer” to achieve that kind of performance. When there are ten, a hundred, or thousands of customers connected to the same satellite, however, there is an immediate and massive degradation of service. Don’t be fooled.
Compare that to the speeds and latency we will see from 5G. As our recent field test confirmed, 5G speeds will be 100 times faster than the global average 4G speeds. And latency will drop to one millisecond (a thousandth of a second). That’s virtually nothing.
With those speeds and latency levels, some remarkable applications become possible: robotic surgeries, remote-controlled semitrucks, seamless holographic telepresence.
That’s why 5G is more than just another so-so improvement in wireless speeds. It will usher in trillions in wealth. And it will be one of the best investing opportunities of the next decade.
If you want to make real money, I’d steer clear of “HaloFi.” I’m only interested in making recommendations that will make my subscribers a lot of money. And some of the best returns in tech will be found with 5G stocks.
That’s why I’m hosting the 5G Investment Summit on August 22 at 8 p.m. ET. I’ll show you my method for picking winning 5G companies. I’ll even give you the name of my favorite 5G company to put on your watchlist.
If you’re serious about investing in bleeding-edge tech, it’s a must-attend event. Save your spot right here.
That’s all the time we have this week. If you have a question that you’d like me to answer, write to me here. I’ll do my best to get to it next week.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge