Harris & Harris Group, Inc. (TINY)

TINY: No doubt like many other investors, I got into this stock after reading Ray Kurzweil's: "The Singularity is Near". It's a superb book (he has a podcast on the web covering content) which will make any reader want to run not walk to get exposure to nanotech. A few hours at most on Google turns up TINY.





Here are the bits to like:


(i) it's nano tech


(ii) it's nano tech.


Add to that:


(iii) it's a fund, spreads risk, has a couple of horses in the race. They are only half invested, with some $50 million sitting in US treasuries in the meantime to help pay the rent. Senior exec bio's look solid, they have some brainy people. Armed with this info, I happily invested my play money, watched them go from $12-$14 and told my friends how clever I am.





Then the quarterly financials were released, stock backtracked, I exited break even. Here's why:





(iv) Listening to Ray Kurzweil on the web it occured to me that nano investing is like gas physics. How ? Overall, the trend is predictable. It's a sure thing that this technology will be huge. However, just like you can't predict how an individual atom in a gas will move, it seems to me you can't pick an individual nano stock. But hold on, TINY is a fund ? Yeah but they only have a couple of dozen investments (atoms !) at best. To labor the analogy: the "gas" of nano is vastly broader: there must be tens of thousands of scientists worldwide, working in colleges, research insitutes and companies- especially in big companies. Where will the breakthroughs come from ? Caltech ? Samsung ? IBM ? Toshiba ? Dow Chemical ?...TINY ?





The odds for TINY must be just that...tiny. In the meantime, any investor can be sure that every three months or so you'll get a new financial statement showing no revenues, no income, less cash.