When investing, there is a meme that describes market behavior in terms of the different mindset of people who engage in a particular asset. The first wave is -suitingly- the early adopters. These people usually know something. They are either an insider to the company, the industry, or they are a visionary recognizing a trend. They come in early, and after some time, when they feel they have received enough reward for their original investment, they get out, or -at least- scale back a bit.
At that point, the trend is recognized and now a better-funded group follows. This is what they call “the smart money”. These include institutional investors, with big wallets, and who usually know where to put their capital to work. Eventually, these folks also get their reward, and also pull out.
Then the “late adopters” or the “dumb money” comes in. Some times, these are the people that get stuck with their investment when the smart money guys pull the rug from under their feet.
You may have seen that technology adoption also follows a similar pattern and you may have also picked up on the trend of me talking more and more about Exponential trends. This is a topic that I have become increasingly interested in.
This topic used to be the exclusive area of visionary futurists like Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize and Singular University, and Salim Ismail, former Chief Innovation Officer for Yahoo and founder of Open ExO.
But lately, another trend has been developing. Last week, I heard, not one, but TWO hedge fund managers talking either about “The Exponential Age” or the “Age of Abundance”.
In my experience, when the hedge funds start rattling on something, it is time to pay attention, it may be fairly close.
If you are interested in getting the details on these, checkout these two videos:
Raoul Pál – Former Goldman Sachs executive and founder and CEO of Real Vision
Jordi Visser, president and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, interviewing tech visionary, Sultan Meghji, CEO and co-founder of Frontier Foundry
TLDR;
The world is about to shift. Again. Some technologies that are coming down the pike will deliver a shift as big as the splitting of the atom. Some resources are about to become very abundant, and the world will shift from offering scarce resources, to managing abundance.