These guys have been marketing a device that looks rather suspiciously like a spectrometer for inspecting food for a few years now:
I've been following this for near two years now and was debating getting signed up on the beta program. The barrier for me has been the monthly service cost, expecting that the device may be rather limited without a good corpus of crowd-sourced data propping it up.
SA is Suadi Arabia
ZA is South Africa
UHG!
Good point; a stock like AAPL sort of behaves like a commodity in that regard. So the question is still about how long you will hold it and if you think the company will outperform the market + inflation. You also have the chance of beneficial corporate actions that may help your position. So do you think AAPL will beat physical gold? Oil? Basically its the difference of holding cash or . The something else being effected by the market.
Maybe right now in this global downturn AAPL stands to retain its value better than cash [think quantitative easing], and better than many of its peers - selling loads of iphones etc. So open a position and ride the trend. Nothing wrong with going with the flow when thats the thing that is happening.
People who jump into a long equity postion which pays no dividends are usually there because it looks like a good company in the "right" sector so you can expect to hold it and then dump it later.
If you are holding short term, then no, there is nothing else but betting on the bigger fool.
If you are holding long term, then you can make money on dividends and on the increase in value of a stock because a good company should appreciate in value faster than the average value of the market [e.g. S&P500 index] + inflation. Many of those companies [and a few exchange traded funds] which have this behavior also pay dividends. So looking at funds in a pension which ideally you want to try not to touch, investing long in dividend bearing vehicles can be a good strategy.
Note that the Long strategy is on the order of years where what these guys are doing is more like minutes and hours.
I agree with other posts here that point out these guys didn't do anything that any other trader isn't constantly doing; the one difference might possibly be if it can be proved these guys had insider knowledge of how this particular algo was behaving to take advantage of it, like if they had worked for Timber Hill at one point.
Space-faring for humans is apparently going to be necessarily cost effective. Since humans are unable to accomplish anything without a positive ROI we're going to need to make space mining lucrative. Once it gets to the point where mining asteroids is more cost effective then operating a terrestrial mine we will see vast explorations into the far reaches of the solar system.
no joke - if EVE is any example then asteroid mining is gonna be way important, if for no other reason than to give pirates something to lock.
"Buy land. They've stopped making it." -- Mark Twain
