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Adam Lass has been a marketing consultant, small-business owner and entrepreneur for over 20 years. He's been a contributor to six major financial newsletters, and has written special bulletins on international intelligence, the Y2K crisis, oil, taxes, Africa, the Asian crisis, martial law, high-tech stocks, silver and precious metals and international investing (and has been mentioned on Yahoo as "a reliable source").
But for all that, it is small-cap investing that really lights him up. Small-cap stocks -- publicly traded companies with capitalizations under $500 million -- are where good folks with good ideas can create explosive gains for investors. These are companies with real products, real customers and real profits. They have books, business plans and work ethics that he understands and appreciates.
He's brings to the Taipan Group the same unvarnished, straight talk about Wall Street and Washington that has made his own newsletter, Penny Stock Fortunes, an unparalleled success.
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Holy Cow! We Made it to the Future.
Now What Are We Going to Do?
by Adam Lass
Congratulations! You've made it into the big 2-0-0-0. Pop the cork on that bottle you've been saving--slap your buddies on the back, kiss the wife and then have a seat before the hysteria of it all makes off with your common sense.
That's right, it's the future. And it's pretty weird. Despite a century of tealeaf readers taking their best shot at predicting the new millennium, few came anywhere near the truth. No flying belts or ray guns. No commuting by personal aircraft. No intergalactic travel.
We do have wrist radios, though...
Still, things are changing so fast that last year's brilliant idea is almost guaranteed to be laughably passČ next year. Just take a look at the Microsoft antitrust trial. Cutting-edge one day, irrelevant due to changing technologies long before even the first ruling.
The speed of change can leave investors gasping for breath. And there is a way to solve this dilemma, a golden mean that can guide you past (most of) the shoals of these uncharted waters. It's a tool that you hopefully already possess (if not, then turn directly to the last paragraph, where I'll tell a little joke and you can go on to the next article).
It's called common sense. That is to say, a sense of wonder--leavened by a strong dose of the kind of ideas that would have made your grandparents happy.
Maybe your grandparents bought the first car in the neighborhood, or maybe they stuck with a horse and buggy. Either way, they knew that they weren't going anywhere if the wheels fell off!
The same basic wisdom applies to new era investing. Yes, some of these new technology stocks are going to the moon. They'll make millionaires, if not billionaires, out of the select few insiders who are privileged to get in at the right time and the right price.
But that doesn't mean that the laws of gravity have been repealed.
Sooner or later (and probably sooner) the majority of these shooting stars are going to run out of power if they don't find a way to make some real bucks. That means selling real stuff to real customers for real profits. That's a fact that you can take to the bank.
Champagne and Maalox
In a moment, I'll give you my readings for next year, as well as a few common-sense investments to take advantage of those predictions. But before I take a stab at next year's progress on the small cap front, let's take a look at last year's ups and downs.
All in all, 1999 saw a remarkably robust economy, with a unique combination of strong growth, low unemployment and negligible inflation. Despite this hothouse climate, small cap stocks -- that is to say, stocks with capitalizations under US$500 million -- have been sucking wind. In fact, the best measure of the small cap market, the Russell 2000, has been in a serious recession, having gone 18 months without setting a new high.
That doesn't mean that there were no profits to be had in this sector, just that index funds didn't get it: It's a stock picker's market (a very nervous stock picker, mind you, what with all the volatile gyrations we've seen).
Spending our grandkids' inheritance
Not only did a lot of folks make a lot of bucks in the market in 1999, some spent even more. According to the U.S. Commerce Department's latest numbers, Americans are stripping their savings accounts faster than ever before.
 And how couldn't we? They're giving us credit for single-handedly rescuing the global economy. Never have so few bought so much from -- oh, never mind. Some call this our just desserts, and some, Alan Greenspan among them, feel that we are trying to have our cake and eat his, too.
Greenspan feels that our unrivaled spending is creating a dangerous inflationary spiral akin to that of the 1970s. Certainly, there are some similarities: gas prices are up (after being less than a buck per gallon all summer!). So's N.Y. real estate (and N.Y. egos: I hear that Don Trump has bought the naming rights for the Lincoln Tunnel). But the comparison quickly wears thin.
Read on...
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