• We won’t have to worry about drug shortages ever again…

  • What will we learn from this Moon mission…

  • The world’s first $100 billion company is about to IPO…

Dear Reader,

Over the weekend, I read through some heartbreaking research concerning the impact of school closures on human longevity.

Policy decisions concerning COVID-19 have been missing rational, logical discussions that weigh the risk for distinct populations along with short-term and long-term damages to society. Everything has been grossly fear- and panic-driven with unproven “Band-Aid” solutions for society.

The research was published by The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and was produced by a joint team out of the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Los Angeles.

To the team’s credit, it acknowledged that the school closures negatively impacted millions of children. And it noted more specifically that the decision to close schools was made “with little understanding of the potential health outcomes associated” with the closures.

The team went one step further and analyzed the potential years of life lost that could be associated with school closures. It may come as a surprise to some, but the sad reality is that our own human longevity is directly related to the education that we receive. Children who are deprived of education live shorter lives. It is that simple.

And because this correlation is well understood, the researchers could calculate how many years will likely be lost by the children who have been impacted by school closures. The number will probably shock most of us.

The researchers estimated that 5.53 million years of life will be lost.

Yet school administrators, teachers’ unions, state politicians, and even “experts” from the medical community told us – and keep telling us – that shutting down schools can “save lives” and “keep everyone safe.”

These generic and unfounded statements are meaningless… even more so considering that influenza is over 10 times more likely to cause severe illness or death compared to COVID-19 for school-aged children. And we also now know that children are not effective spreaders of COVID-19.

The decision to close schools is doing the opposite of what we were told. It is costing life – about 5.53 million years of life. And the underprivileged will be disproportionally impacted.

With remarkable honesty, the authors of the research concluded, “We believe that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States has extracted an enormous sacrifice from its youngest citizens to protect the health of its oldest.”

The most ironic and criminal aspect of this is that the governors of five U.S. states (New York, Michigan, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) mandated that symptomatic COVID-19 patients be sent to nursing homes earlier this year – our most vulnerable demographic – instead of caring for them in medical facilities. This resulted in about 40% of the COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. Yet no one is talking about this.

Needless to say, those decisions were absolutely absurd. The rational approach was, and still is, to aggressively protect those most at risk in society until we have vaccines.

The rest of us should be allowed to live and support ourselves and our families… and keep the economy running, employed, and able to support those in need.

Now let’s turn to our insights…

America’s manufacturing renaissance is underway…

One of the best ways to spot the biggest trends in tech is to keep an eye on what’s happening in the world of venture capital (VC). “Follow the money” is always a smart analytical technique to use when researching trends and companies.

And right now, an incredible amount of money is flowing into companies that are bringing manufacturing back to America.

One such company is National Resilience (also known as “Resilience”), which was founded this year in San Diego. This company plans to build next-generation pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in the U.S.

Under normal circumstances, such a young company would do well to raise several million in its first VC rounds.

But these aren’t normal times…

National Resilience just raised $750 million in its Series B VC round. This is an extraordinary raise for such an early funding round.

And that means National Resilience has now raised $800 million since its founding earlier this year – all in the span of about six months. Amazing!

And we have COVID-19 to thank for this shift. Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, it became starkly obvious that our pharmaceutical supply chains are fragile.

With most key pharmaceutical ingredients and drug manufacturing controlled by China and India, the developed world saw major drug shortages at the height of the lockdowns. This led to people not getting the prescription medicines they needed. And that put many lives at risk.

That’s why National Resilience was founded. It plans to secure medical supply chains by building the most modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plants in the world… right here in America.

(If any readers are interested in learning more about this trend… and the U.S.’s move away from relying on China… then you can go here to see this recent presentation I put together.)

These plants will be equipped with bleeding-edge pharmaceutical manufacturing technology. That’s going to power the rise of precision medicine, which we have talked a lot about in these pages.

Genetic editing technology is enabling advanced therapies capable of curing diseases that have been untreatable up to this point.

But these gene and cell therapies are far more complex to manufacture than simple pills and antibiotics. To produce these advanced therapies at scale, we’ll require sophisticated staff and advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment.

And that’s why National Resilience is raising so much money. It is not only securing our current supply chains, but it will also power future supply chains of more advanced therapies – all onshore, where both supply and quality can be monitored and controlled.

So this company represents a convergence of two massive trends – decentralized manufacturing and precision medicine.

And we should certainly add National Resilience to our early stage watchlist. I expect one or two more future funding rounds and then a potential IPO to follow once its first manufacturing facility is up and running.

The modern space race is heating up…

As we were all enjoying the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., China launched its Chang’e 5 mission to the Moon. This largely went unnoticed given the timing, but it’s an exciting mission to watch.

Chang’e 5 Launch

Source: Space.com

The goal of the mission is to bring back lunar samples. This will be the first time in 44 years that any country has brought back samples from the Moon. It’s long overdue.

Of course, the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972 brought back a large quantity of lunar samples – 382 kilograms to be exact. Then Russia’s Luna 24 mission brought back additional samples in 1976. That was the last lunar sample return mission.

Of course, we have far more advanced analytical tools available today. And we also have more sophisticated spacecraft and drilling mechanisms for the lunar surface. I can’t wait to see what we learn.

And fortunately, the wait won’t be long.

Chang’e 5 has already reached lunar orbit. But the lander is not equipped with the heaters necessary to survive a lunar night, so its timeline is short. It must complete the mission in just two weeks – the equivalent of a lunar day.

That means Chang’e 5 must get the lander down to the Moon, drill two meters into the surface, collect the samples, launch the lander back up to the orbiter, transfer the samples to the return module, and return to Earth…

It sounds like a lot. And that’s because it is. But this is the Moon, not a mission to Mars.

The Chang’e 5 mission is scheduled to land in Mongolia in mid-December. We will follow this closely here in The Bleeding Edge.

Bigger picture – this is yet another sign that the modern space race is heating up. And it’s not happening just within the U.S.

Between incumbents and newcomers like SpaceX, Relativity Space, and Rocket Lab, it’s happening at a nation-state level. We’re in for some incredible developments over the next few years.

The world’s first private centacorn is about to be born…

Stripe is the most successful financial technology (fintech) company that very few people know exists. That’s both because Stripe is still a private company and because it operates behind the scenes in the payments industry. It is not a customer-facing product or service.

Founded in 2009, Stripe provides the application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow companies to take credit card payments through mobile and web-based applications.

Stripe’s technology allows vendors to accept payments without having to worry about anything on the back end. The APIs handle everything and Stripe simply deposits the money – minus a small fee – into the vendor’s account.

Stripe is so successful that even companies like Amazon use its technology. That’s how critical Stripe is to the digital payments ecosystem.

In fact, the use of Stripe is so widespread that, if you purchase goods or services over the internet, I can all but guarantee that you are a regular user of Stripe’s technology.

Stripe was last valued at $36 billion this April. The deal had already been structured before the pandemic started impacting consumer behavior.

Even back then, it was the equivalent of a large-cap company. But the big news is that Stripe is working on a late-stage funding round that will value the company as high as $100 billion. That’s unheard of for a private company.

In fact, we don’t even have a word for private companies valued above $100 billion.

Private companies valued above $1 billion are called unicorns because they used to be extremely rare. Then we coined the term “decacorns” for private companies valued above $10 billion. Now we need a new word for $100 billion companies. “Centacorn” is probably the most logical.

While I love Stripe as a company, this speaks to how the initial public offering (IPO) market has become distorted over the last decade or so.

The venture capitalists are keeping the best companies private for far longer than they should, specifically to reserve all the gains for themselves. By the time these companies go public, there’s limited upside left. Normal investors are left with the scraps.

This will almost certainly be Stripe’s last VC funding round. And when the IPO finally happens, Stripe is destined to be one of the most richly valued companies ever to go public.

It will also be one of the most lucrative payouts in Silicon Valley history. The VCs who have intentionally kept Stripe private since 2010 are going to make an unbelievable fortune on the deal.

Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel were all very early investors.

And think about this – at these valuation levels, very few companies on the planet could acquire Stripe. That’s not typically the case when we talk about private companies. If it were 20 years ago, Stripe would have gone public much sooner.

This will be an IPO for us to track. And while there won’t be venture capital-like returns investing in Stripe when it goes public, there can still be great profits for normal investors at the right price.

Here at Brownstone Research, I’m committed to developing new investment strategies that provide normal investors access to investments before they have their IPOs. My mission is to stack the chips in favor of normal investors.

Readers can expect to hear much more about the progress we are making toward this goal as we move into 2021.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

P.S. As readers of The Bleeding Edge know, we are entering a “golden age” for biotechnology.

Fortunes will be made in the years ahead with the best biotech companies, especially those working in the precision medicine trend we mentioned above.

But before we “throw a dart” at any biotechnology stock, we should know that not all of them will be winners. That’s why it’s important to invest in only the best ones.

And that’s why I’m hosting The Cure Event on Wednesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. ET.

During this special presentation, I’ll break down the incredible advancements happening in the world of biotech and precision medicine right now. We’ll go over how investors can separate the wheat from the chaff in this industry.

And I’ll also give details of my No. 1 biotech stock to own today… one that’s on the path to curing a disease of genetic origin. This is a stock that needs to be in every tech investor’s portfolio. Based on my analysis, as much as 1,000% returns are on the table with this company.

For investors interested in joining me, simply go right here to reserve your spot.

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