Excerpt from Barrons:
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09/02
Like xenotransplantation.
Ring a bell? Possibly not. But we respectfully suggest you familiarize
yourself posthaste with that phase, even if it makes your tongue a little
tired.
For potentially, anyway, xenotransplantation could be of greater importance
to investors than, hard as it may be to believe, even such an earth-shattering
change as the switch to decimals from fractions in reporting stock prices.
Indeed, it may well emerge as the biggest breakthrough in Wall Street since
the creation of the stockbroker by crossing an optimist with a bull terrier.
Frankly, xenotransplantation was Greek to us until we came across it in our
favorite medical journal, The Wall Street Journal. Not only did we learn what
it meant -- transplanting organs from one species to another -- but also that
the process of using animals as organ donors for humans, which had defied
every effort by brave biotechnicians to put it into practice, suddenly looks
doable!
In no small measure, the Journal informed us, we can direct our hurrahs
toward a small company fittingly called BioTransplant, which has bred a line
of miniature pigs that happily do not send harmful pig viruses along with any
of their organs when implanted in Homo sapiens.
The obvious market is folks in need of new kidneys, livers and hearts. But given the miraculous powers of modern science, we envision brain transplants
-- and of brain slivers -- as well.
And it's here that we foresee a huge, revolutionary impact on Wall Street.
For its denizens seem especially amenable to xenotransplantation, since pigs
have long been as prominent a part of the investment landscape as bulls and
bears, as evidenced by the old stock market ditty that "bulls make money,
bears make money but pigs make more money than anyone."
Just think of the impact of a modicum of gray matter transferred from those
miniature pigs to the multitude of timid investors. We're talking especially
about the twitchy souls who squirrel away their dough in money market funds.
At last count, there was a tidy $1.75 trillion in those still-water
repositories, of which nearly $1 trillion represents individual (as against
institutional) money.
Infuse these timorous masses with the right quotient of hoggishness -- or
greed, as it is called in human parlance -- and they and their trillion bucks
will fling themselves at the stock market. Result: Dow 36,000 by Christmas,
guaranteed!
And imagine what a tiny slice of frontal lobe from a cute little pig could
do for analysts. Instead of that cautious reckoning that the stock they're
touting is slated to rise from its current price of 25 to 200, they can{snip} |
