During a presentation I had to give at one of the local universities, I involuntarily eavesdropped on the conversation of two young collegians.

Don't get me wrong. It is not my habit to listen in on people's private conversations... mostly because so very few of them seem to have something interesting to say.

It wasn't really what they were saying that caught my attention. After all, expecting profound insights from people whose main accomplishments would appear to be a penchant for ugly shoes, scraggly goatees and infected navel piercings may not be realistic.

It was more the tone in which the one student spat out two words.

"Old Economy."

In it, I recognized the same identity-forming disdain and superiority my generation reserved for ABBA and the Bee Gees, as we bought Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise LPs from record store clerks with No Nukes buttons on their army parkas.

And suddenly I recalled my last week at high school, when our Social Studies teacher polled the Class of '82 on What We Wanted to Be When We Grew Up. No surprises here: Having graduated from a private Jesuit Gymnasium, few of my fellow students offered alternatives to the respectable doctor-dentist-lawyer-banker-tax adviser repertoire of post-adolescent ambition.

Which prompted our teacher's comment: "Every single one going into professional services. Who for crying out loud's going to produce anything?"

And that's exactly the crux of the New Economy. Who is producing anything... creating value... creating real assets? And I don't mean software that allows you to download 20-second clips of raunchy home movies or browser-driven computer games that can be played while at work... and have a dummy text document attached that you can click on to make it seem like you're working when the boss saunters by.

Everywhere you look, you find glorified ad salesmen dealing in intangibles... "click-throughs," "stickyness," "eyeballs"... variables that conveniently elude quantification by hard, dollar-denominated cost-benefit analysis.

In fact, when all is said and done, I think it's elements of the Old Economy that will come out on top. Manufacturers. Shippers. Marketers who know their business and are able to credibly project revenues based on hard data.

Once all the New Economy whiz kids and their enthusiastic sponsors have learned that nothing in this world is really free... they'll have to get back to basics, and remember that earning a dollar by creating or adding value is a tough business, with no guarantee of any kind that you'll ever make a profit.

This issue of Taipan presents you with a number of excellent plays on some drastically undervalued stocks. They're not Old or New Economy. They're REAL ECONOMY investments, based on real products, real markets, and real profits.

Profits that can be yours for the taking.

Cordially yours,

J. Christoph Amberger
Publisher, Taipan

P.S.: Speaking of Real Companies: The U.S. print edition of Taipan includes a very worthwhile special introduction to a trading service headed by our 247profits.com associate Adam Lass... editor of the burgeoning Penny Stock Fortunes. If there's a man who knows the Real Economy, it's Adam... bringing decades of experience as a real entrepreneur to his method of picking real companies with real potential. I urge you to take a closer look at what he has to say.

For the convenience of our overseas and online readers, we have posted this introduction on the Penny Stock Fortunes website.