Dr. Allen Alper Interviews Darrell Brookstein of The Nanotech Company, LLC
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By Dr. Allen Alper
| Interviewer: |
We're talking to Darrell Brookstein with The Nanotech Company, LLC. So, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your background and your company and how you're proceeding? Also, I know our readers would be interested in what you think of nanotechnology and the mining industry. Where it is today and where it's going? |
| Darrell Brookstein: |
Yes. My background actually began in the natural resource sector. Out of college I started focusing on mining stocks, and from 1976 to 2000 I was involved in natural resource venture capital. I wrote a newsletter your readers may remember called The Prospector for 11 years, which was probably the top newsletter in mining shares in the '80s, and I had a brokerage firm, that was the leading U.S. brokerage firm in Canadian mining shares for the better part of that decade as well. I edited a book called, Small Fortunes in Penny Gold Stocks with Doug Casey, and we produced that in the early '80s. Then I wrote another book called How to Make a Fortune Trading Penny Mining Shares.
So, that's really my background, and I was involved in the financing of many of what became major mining companies in the '80s and '90s and ended my natural resource focus for the time being in the late '90s when my group helped put together Ultra Petroleum, which eventually went public and trades on the American Stock Exchange. Also we developed the financial and corporate structure of a mid-size natural gas company called Penneco Energy, which was taken over by Marathon. In the late 2000s, early 2001, I started to focus on something I'd been looking at since the late '80s, which was the cutting edge of science and technology, nanotechnology, MEMS, microfluidics and micro-electronics. And I said, "Boy, as soon as I can find somebody who actually knows something about these things and can tell me if I'm going in the right direction this just seems like an exciting area."
I ended up meeting Erkki Ruoslahti, who is considered probably the leading bio-nanoscientist, and we shared some common interests and developed a business in 2001 focused on the financial and investment side of nanotechnology and other advanced technologies. I acquired the key website, Nanotechnology.com, and wrote the first and only book that's ever been written on successful investing at the cutting edge of technology called Nanotech Fortunes, which is available on Amazon and our website. I started producing a variety of different newsletters related to both the science and technology and also investing in the cutting edge of technology. There's a lot to talk about from there, but that's the background. |
| Interviewer: |
Now, what would you say the current state of nanotechnology is? Where do you think it's going, and also, where would you advise people to consider to investing in or exploring in nanotechnology? |
| Darrell Brookstein: |
Well, what many people don’t know or realize is nanotechnology is already influencing major companies. More than 150 of the Fortune 500 have major internal nanotechnology initiatives. I mean, typically hundreds of millions of dollars annually by the individual companies. For example, 3M reported last year that more than a billion dollars in their sales came from nanotech products. Obviously, General Electric, DuPont, Chevron, Intel, IBM are leading folks in nanotechnology. IBM's the leading international intellectual property holder in nanotechnology.
Intel, for example, has been at the nanoscale now for well over three years, and they are now at 45 nanometers and below where they're doing engineering, clever engineering (by the way, the width of a human hair is 80,000 nanometers). So we could definitely say they’re engineering at the nanoscale, and I would argue that that's nanotechnology as well.
These companies are moving forward very quickly. Then you have a small group of about 80 to 130, depending on how you define it, publicly traded nanotech stocks, and of them, we think about 25 of them are actually interesting. We’ve really never recommended any of them for the long-term. We've traded them successfully, quite successfully, over the last three years, but we haven't recommended any of them for the long-term.
Right now we're mostly looking at long-short strategies where you make a long $10,000.00 worth of one stock and short $10,000.00 of another. In the nanotech field it would be like buying $10,000 worth of Ford and selling $10,000.00 worth of General Motors. You pick things in similar areas and you go long-short. We think that's the way to make money with some consistency in these crazy, currently down-trending markets.
But the “small tech”, nanotech and cutting-edge technology deals are still (with few exceptions – and I'll name one or two of the exceptions) a few years away from having consistent revenues, much less earnings. Some exceptions would be Illumina (ILMN), which is what we call “small technology”. It's not quite the nano-scale, but it's deeply microscale. They're competitive in “lab-on-a-chip” with Affymetrix (AFFX), and they're doing a fantastic job. There are two to three other companies that are making money and have earnings beyond revenues.
Another one would be Abraxis (ABII), a true nanotech-based, bio-pharma company or biotech company which delivers cancer-killing toxins in a nanoparticle of albumin, which is a human milk protein and is having great success in breast cancer. We think it will be applied to other cancers as well. Similar technologies to Abraxis's technology that are not owned by Abraxis are also going to have huge success in drug delivery.
On the broader question of where nanotech is going, when you hear “greentech”, “clean tech”, solar, alternative energy, all of these things are being developed, enhanced and moved forward by nanotechnology. They're really another way of saying “nanotechnology” because the commercialization of those technologies, products and industries is not moving anywhere without it. |
| Interviewer: |
That's very interesting. I'm glad I had the opportunity to talk with you. What is your focus at The Nanotech Company? |
| Darrell Brookstein: |
We advise both advanced technology companies and investors on how to proceed in this direction. We have the scientific and technical background as well as the public market and private market, venture capital and private equity background to help both sides of that equation (the companies themselves and the investors in those companies). |
| Interviewer: |
I enjoyed talking to you. You’re very knowledgeable in both nanotech and the mining sector. I appreciate it. |
| Darrell Brookstein: |
Glad to be here. Thank you. |
| Interviewer: |
For more information go to www.nanotechnology.com/blogs/blognano/ or http://www.Nanotechnology.com |
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