Additionally, our group tactician, Bryan Bottarelli,
notes that the implied volatility of SPX call contracts
is at a historic low. Bryan suggests traders use this
discount to purchase additional time virtually for
free. His favored contract at this time is the SPX
June 1,175 Call (SPT FO). He recommends that you pay no more than US$23.50 for it…   targeting an
easy 100% gain if the SPX continues its march up to
1,300.        As always, look for updates on this play via your
daily 247profits e-Dispatch. 6 Next TAIPAN        “…people tell me about
miniaturization, and how far
it has progressed today. They
tell me about electric motors
that are the size of the nail on
your small finger. And there
is a device on the market,
they tell me, by which you
can write the Lord’s Prayer on
the head of a pin. But that’s
nothing; that’s the most prim-
itive, halting step in the direc- tion I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly
small world that is below. In the year 2000,
when they look back at this age, they will won-
der why it was not until the year 1960 that
anybody began seriously to move in this
direction. Why cannot we write the entire 24
volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the
head of a pin?” —   Richard P. Feynman, December 29, 1959        Back in 1959, Richard Feynman stated that there
was no scientific law that would prohibit the manip-
ulation of matter atom by atom. He put out two
US$1,000 prizes. The first was for anyone who could
write the encyclopedia on the head of a pin (1 to 2
mm), in other words shrink it by a factor of 25,000.
The second was for anyone who could create a 0.4-
mm motor. Both have been claimed.        For years, the science of nanotechnology has pro-
gressed in relative obscurity. You may remember
IBM writing “IBM”  using 35 Xenon atoms back in
1989. At Taipan, we’ve been writing about the com-
ing nanotech revolution for more than five years, but
the technology has never quite made it out of the
lab and into our portfolio…   until now. A strong foundation Now there are products on the market. In chemi- cals, manufacturing, biotechnology, semiconductors
and energy—  in almost everything produced by man, nanotechnology will lead to innovative new prod-
ucts. Eighty percent of top executives believe that
nanotechnology is relevant to their specific industry.        This is the ultimate disruptive technology.
Estimates are that nanotech products and services
will bring in US$1 trillion in revenue by 2015. And I
believe it. Right now on the market there are bucky-
balls made out of carbon molecules (a buckyball or
fullerene is the geometrical shape of a soccer ball—
the strongest known to man).        These can be stretched into nanotubes. They now
cost US$20 a gram, down from US$600. They can be
woven together into nanoropes or nanofibers to cre-
ate materials that are 100 times stronger than steel,
with electrical conductivity similar to copper and the
thermal conductivity of diamonds. A single nan-
otube is 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.        Nissan has an SUV with a nanotube-enhanced
bumper (5% of the plastic) that will automatically
return to its original shape after a fender-bender. It’s
already for sale in Japan. This isn’t the Internet Many people compare this to the Internet revolu- tion. They’ve got it wrong. You won’t find any frat
boys thinking up ideas in a garage. The tools neces-
sary to manipulate atoms are expensive. The barri-
ers to entry are very high. Furthermore, the number
of real companies playing in this sphere is limited.
Right now there are about 20 on my watch list.
Some of these companies will win, some will lose…
but most will launch as more and more real prod-
ucts hit the market. Picks and shovels redux        One way to play this emerging technology is to
buy the companies that make R&D possible. One of
these companies is VECO.        Veeco Instruments (VECO:NASDAQ) is the top
manufacture of measurement tools used in disk
drives and semiconductor chips. They sell to the There’s (still) plenty of room at the bottom Chris DeHaemer