I apply "Tesla like" stock selection Criteria:
1. Founder CEO
- Skin in the Came: founded company with personal risk and maintains significant personal ownership,
- Hands on and technically competent - no MBAs
- driven by long term personal vision - will not stray of course for better quarterly numbers
2 Promising tech
- Disruptive Technology - displaces current solution with better, and eventually cheaper product ,
- Sky is the Limit ... once you build the better ladder - raw ingredients are easily available and magic is in figuring out how to put them together and deliver them to consumer
3. Favourable macro and timing
- having objectively good social impact (no FaceBook or Twitter)
- in line with current mass social perception - likely to survive bot fuelled social media cancel mob
Some of my picks are:
BYND, Impossible foods (private), MMED and CMPS
I would not discount the last criterion ... especially for smaller companies. CMPS got hammered by PC mob when they got awarded patent application for their psylocibin formulation, apparently trying to cure the depression when suicide rate is spiking is not enough to assure self-righteous arm chair do-gooders.
Great criteria. I know another stock that fits.
I recently invested in a tiny biotech company with huge potential. This is a private placement opportunity for US Accredited Investors or non-US citizens only. The minimum investment is 50k US dollars or euros, with investor intention to hold the shares for years.
The company,
EmeraMed Limited, was founded by Boyd Haley, PhD, a distinguished research scientist and former Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky. Dr Haley’s team is preparing to market a new drug (Emeramide, aka NBMI) that binds tightly with mercury and other toxic metals trapped in body tissues. This binding with a metal (called chelation) stops its toxicity and allows the body to safely excrete it.
There is nothing else like Emeramide. No FDA-approved treatment exists now for mercury poisoning, and the few drugs used off-label (or on-label for lead poisoning) are not very effective and often toxic. Emeramide is extremely safe, as demonstrated since 2005 by extensive animal testing, human clinical trials, and use by thousands of people when it was briefly sold as an antioxidant (which it also is). Emeramide effectively chelates many different toxic metals, because the molecule has two arms that adjust to get a double-grip on a metal ion of any size, as shown here:
The company is currently in the final stages of seeking FDA approval to market Emeramide as a mercury chelator. Personally I believe chronic mercury poisoning is far more common than government agencies acknowledge, because:
- No practical test exists to accurately measure mercury trapped in body organs.
- Studies suggest mercury causes or contributes to many common diseases (heart disease, cancer, depression, Alzheimer’s, autism, ADHD, chronic fatigue, hypothyroidism, leaky gut, allergies, asthma, arthritis, autoimmunity, etc.)
- Billions of people have been, or still are, exposed to dental amalgam fillings (which are half mercury), medical products preserved with mercury (vaccines, contact lens solutions, etc.), and mercury-contaminated fish and shellfish.
Many of EmeraMed’s investors are dentists who were mercury-poisoned by their practice, and cured themselves and their patients with Emeramide when it was available as an antioxidant supplement (then called OSR#1). Around the world, enormous health problems are also caused by arsenic in drinking water, and by lead in water pipes, paint and gasoline. So global demand should be high for an effective chelator of toxic metals in the human body.
However, EmeraMed has bigger plans. After approval for mercury, they intend to seek marketing approval for the following uses, for which clinical trials are underway or planned:
- Iron overload. Millions of people suffer excess-iron poisoning due to Hereditary Hemochromatosis or frequent blood transfusions required for diseases such as Sickle Cell Anemia and Beta-Thalassemia Major. Emeramide binds with free iron (which is toxic) but not protein-bound iron (which is essential) and has no toxicity, unlike the leading iron chelator (Deferasirox) with annual sales over $1B. Parkinson’s Disease patients have excess iron in the brain, and many have improved rapidly from oral Emeramide.
- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Toxic metals are toxic partly because they displace essential metals from body proteins, releasing free iron, copper and zinc. Free iron and copper then generate large amounts of reactive molecules (free radicals) that damage body molecules. Such damage (called oxidative stress) causes many diseases, including COPD. Emeramide reduces oxidative stress, not only by chelating toxic metals and free iron and copper, but also by binding with free radicals. COPD patients have shown impressive recoveries from using Emeramide.
- Acetaminophen (Tylenol) toxicity. Pain medications containing Acetaminophen can damage the liver because the drug metabolizes to a free radical called NAPQI. Emeramide binds and detoxifies NAPQI and other free radicals. Thus Emeramide shows promise for treating Tylenol overdose, and for combining in a pill with Acetaminophen. Such a pain pill could be safer than Tylenol, and nonaddictive unlike opioids that are causing huge addiction problems.
- Viral infections. Your immune system fights viruses using a self-produced antioxidant and chelator called glutathione. Emeramide boosts intracellular glutathione dramatically in people with low levels (the old or sick). It may also inhibit COVID viruses by chelating free iron that the virus releases to replicate itself.
- Animal uses. Pets and wild animals suffer metal poisoning and oxidative stress from eating contaminated food. Dr Haley has seen Emeramide relieve arthritis in a pet dog, cure lameness in a racehorse, and bring wild eagles and owls from near-death to flying away. Veterinary medicine and animal feed are large markets.
- Environmental uses. There is no safe level of arsenic in drinking water, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Yet the EPA currently allows up to 10 parts per billion (2500 times California’s public health goal) because of the high cost and difficulty of removing arsenic from water supplies. That could change after mass production of Emeramide. The water treatment certification requirements of the National Sanitation Foundation are similar to the drug approval tests currently underway,
In short, EmeraMed's total addressable market is not as vast as Tesla’s, but it is not small.
I’m very happy to be a Tesla investor, not only for the financial potential, but also because they are helping save the world. I feel the same about EmeraMed. I am using their drug myself (with FDA permission for “compassionate use”) and I believe it is helping save my health.
Of course, anyone interested should do their own due diligence and
request the company’s Private Placement Memo. Here is one of Dr Haley’s many interviews and scientific lectures on YouTube:
