Tonight, I’ll Reveal These “Mandated” Gains

• CRISPR continues to improve lives…
• TSMC’s semiconductor road map has good news…
• Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot…

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Dear Reader,

I know market volatility has been at the forefront of investors’ minds. We’ve all felt the effects of the market shift to bearish sentiment.

That’s why I want to bring awareness about one particular kind of investment… one that billionaires, elected officials, and hedge funds are currently using to profit. That’s because right now, investors are “mandated” to make up to $2,300 upfront. And that’s not counting any long-term gains that result from these deals.

In fact, these investments are the only ones where our money is contractually protected. And that’s invaluable in this kind of market environment.

Yet despite making big money on these deals, the elites are busy calling them “complicated” and even “dangerous” in the press. There’s even legislation in the works to restrict these investment vehicles to accredited investors.

In other words, they want to keep these investments all to themselves.

That’s why tonight, I’ll be presenting all the facts at my “Washington D.C.’s Mandated Money” event. Starting at 8 p.m. ET, I’ll go over how these “mandated” investments work… and how we can all profit from them even amid the current volatility.

And I’d like to invite all my readers to attend. If you haven’t yet RSVP’d, please don’t wait. You can sign up in seconds by going right here.

The first FDA-Approved CRISPR Therapy?

Two of our favorite biotech companies, CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, just released updated results from joint clinical trials of their lead CRISPR therapy. The first trial targets sickle-cell disease. The second is for patients with beta thalassemia.

And the latest data is almost unbelievable.

All 31 of the initial patients in the sickle-cell trial have been free from episodes of severe pain since treatment.

And 42 of the 44 blood thalassemia patients have not required any blood transfusions since treatment. That’s incredible considering they typically needed a transfusion every few months before this treatment.

And even the two patients who still needed blood transfusions experienced tremendous benefits. They have seen an 89% and a 75% reduction in their transfusion volume, respectively.

That means all 75 patients in these two trials have experienced a functional cure or incredible improvements. Talk about remarkable results.

And here’s the thing – these are one-time treatment options.

The clinicians take cells out of the patient’s body, modify them in a lab using CRISPR, then inject the cells back into the patient. That’s it. No additional treatment is required.

Thanks to these great results, CRISPR and Vertex are extending their trials to children under the age of 12.

This is a huge milestone. And it’s great for the affected children who are born with these blood disorders. They won’t have to go through a lifetime of blood transfusions as they grow up.

As a result, CRISPR and Vertex are now in position to be the first companies to get a CRISPR-based therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They plan to apply for approval either late this year or early 2023.

So this is an exciting moment in time for the precision medicine industry.

It’s also very bullish for CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP), Vertex Pharmaceuticals (VRTX), and even other companies working on CRISPR-based therapies.

The biotech sector has been beaten down in the equity markets for about 15 months now due to the policies surrounding the pandemic… but we are still seeing incredible developments like this. 

That tells me it’s only a matter of time before capital flows back into the sector again. In the months that follow, it will spring back to life.

Bleeding-edge technology marches on…

We talked last week about how Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) just increased its revenue guidance and its capital expenditures (CapEx) for the year. This came in stark contrast to the market volatility and economic uncertainty that we have seen.

Well, the story just got even better.

For the first time, TSMC just laid out its product roadmap for the next few years. It details a clear path to 2 nanometer (nm) semiconductor manufacturing technology. This refers to the distance between the transistors on a semiconductor.

For context, the bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing today is 5 nm. This is the technology used in the latest generation of iPhones and some other smartphones today.

The significance of each successive semiconductor manufacturing process – getting the transistors closer together – is that it makes the chips smaller, more powerful, and more power-efficient.

This improves performance and extends the battery life of consumer electronics. In time, this also reduces costs.

Here’s TSMC’s road map. This shows the progression, performance gains, and timeline for each jump in semiconductor manufacturing technology:

Reading from left to right, we can see that the move from 5 nm (N5) to 3 nm (N3) technology will happen in the second half of this year. The move from 5 nm to 3 nm will result in a 10–15% performance improvement at the same power. Or we’ll see a 25–30% improvement in energy efficiency at the same speed.

This illustrates the trade-off between speed and power consumption. Consumer electronics producers can choose to take whatever combination of performance gains and power reduction they want when they employ the new chips.

Looking at the next column, the move from 5 nm to the next generation of 3 nm (N3E) tech will happen around the summer of next year. It will result in 18% performance gains or 34% power reduction… or any combination in between.

And the last column shows us TSMC’s plan for 2 nm (N2) technology. That’s on track for the second half of 2025. And it will result in a 10–15% performance improvement or a 23–30% power reduction over 3 nm.

As we can see, these are material improvements with the release of every new generation. That compounds over time.

And here’s the big takeaway – TSMC would not be advancing this quickly if it wasn’t seeing demand and economic growth. That’s why I continue to think that the negative market sentiment we are seeing right now is temporary.

If we were seeing a decline in investment and revenues in the semiconductor industry, I’d be very worried. But that’s not the case… We are seeing exactly the opposite.

And that tells me that we will see strength in the coming months. We just have to weather the storm in the markets to get there.

Microsoft’s latest move is a head-scratcher…

We’ll wrap up today with the latest on Microsoft’s “corporate strategy” for its Teams product… Or perhaps “blooper” would be a better way to describe it.

As I’m sure many readers know, Teams is Microsoft’s video call and collaboration software. We can think of it as Microsoft’s version of Zoom. And the tech giant just announced plans to bring casual games, like Solitaire and Connect 4, to the platform.

The goal here is to design these games so that colleagues can play them against each other during meetings on the Teams platform.

No kidding. That’s Microsoft’s big strategy for Teams.

To state the obvious, what happens to productivity when coworkers are playing games during their video meetings? Will anything meaningful get done?

This is quite an odd strategy, especially when we consider who the primary customers are.

For Teams, Microsoft is selling almost exclusively to enterprise clients. These are corporate information technology (IT) departments and executives who are responsible for corporate productivity.

Yet the new pitch is that employees can play games in Teams during their meetings. How does that make sense?

Typically, I can read between the lines on stuff like this and figure out what’s really going on. But I’m struggling to grasp the logic on this decision.

Perhaps Microsoft is doing this as a stealthy way to softly transition people to a metaverse environment for work, and this is just about positioning Teams for a future metaverse play? That’s the only way this halfway makes sense.

Regardless, I can’t imagine this will work well. The moment productivity declines, enterprise clients are going to ditch Teams for top alternatives like Zoom.

So to me, this looks like just another textbook case of a legacy incumbent shooting itself in the foot. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Zoom pick up even more market share, or for that matter, the wave of new startups that are challenging Zoom’s current dominance.

Regards,

Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge

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