I founded ARK Invest in 2014 for one reason, and that was to focus solely on disruptive
innovation.
[MUSIC PLAYING] We believe that there are five innovation
platforms evolving at the same time.
This has never happened in history.
You have to go back to the late 1800s to see three innovation platforms evolving at the
same time-- back then, electricity, telephone, and the internal combustion engine.
For the 50 years through 1929, because of those innovation platforms, we experienced
a booming economy and very low inflation.
We see that happening with these five platforms, which are all ready, we believe, for prime
time.
The five innovation platforms upon which we base all of our research are DNA sequencing,
robotics, energy storage, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology.
These platforms cut across sectors.
They cut across geographies.
They cut across markets.
And importantly, they are converging with each other to spawn new innovation.
A really good example of that is autonomous taxi networks.
What are autonomous taxi networks or autonomous vehicles?
They are robots.
Autonomous vehicles are robots.
They will be electric.
So they'll be run by batteries, and transportation will be moving onto the grid.
And they are powered by artificial intelligence.
So those are three platforms converging.
Now, just think about traditional research departments.
Who's going to follow those stocks?
These are platforms which cut across sectors and geographies.
Only with a new kind of research effort do we believe that capital markets will fully
be able to exploit these transformational opportunities.
So we have an open research architecture.
We are sharing our research throughout the world, especially on social media.
We are living in the communities we're researching.
So we are pushing our research into Twitter, into LinkedIn, into Facebook, into Medium,
into any social network that we think will help our analysts and our investors live in
the communities we're researching.
In the spirit of our open research ecosystem, I hope you enjoy the big ideas of 2019.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Deep learning is software that writes itself
using large amounts of data.
So all of a sudden, you don't need programmers to do this anymore.
You just feed it lots of data.
And the end result is so much more powerful than anything that a small team of humans
can write.
Each wave of software disruption adds a huge amount of value to our economy.
When you look at the PC-driven software evolution of that decade, that added about $4 trillion
to the economy.
The internet, which created the FANG companies, added about $10 trillion.
By our estimates, deep learning is going to add $30 trillion to the economy.
And this is really a testament to each wave being larger than the next because software
is eating more and more industries.
PC era only ate a few industries like desktop publishing.
With the internet, it was maybe media.
With deep learning, it's going to be every industry, everything from heavy construction
to energy to retail to health care.
All the big-ticket items were going to be captured by deep learning.
If you thought the internet was disruptive, you haven't seen anything yet.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Basically, if you hear the term digital wallet,
you're probably thinking of a small application on your phone with your card storage and to
make your payments easy.
But that's just the beginning.
So digital wallets are soon going to emerge as a financial ecosystem that are going to
support a number of financial services.
It could be your taxes.
It could be your investing.
It could be in your insurance or even access to crypto assets.
So they're going to become a financial hub.
In terms of digital wallet opportunity, if you look at the growth of digital wallets
in the US, it's already 30 million users are using digital wallets as of today.
And we believe about 75% of the US adult population will be using the digital wallet by 2023.
Once the bank branch opportunity is realized, around $200 billion of market capital will
be attributable to digital wallet companies like Credit Cash or Venmo that are playing
in the space right now.
So with digital wallet, it's essentially a bank branch in your pocket.
So an access to financial services is as simple as making a phone call.
Hey, there.
Hi.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Throughout the history of civilization, we've
never really had the ability to transfer and store value without relying on an intermediary
or a centralized governing body.
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, proposed an alternative monetary
system that was free from top-down control, governed by the decentralized masses.
So with Bitcoin, for the first time, we have the opportunity to have true ownership of
our wealth.
And this, for the first time, allows us to openly, globally, and borderlessly have an
economy separate from existing monetary systems.
Fast forward 10 years, and Bitcoin, as a network, process is over $1 trillion of value annually.
When you compare that to Western Union or PayPal, Bitcoin surpasses that and is within
an order of magnitude of Visa's.
So 10 years in, Bitcoin being volatile is normal.
This is not a six-year get-rich-quick scheme.
This is a multidecadal shift in how we perceive money and monetary systems today.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Lithium-ion batteries have been around since
the early 1990s.
But we're approaching some really exciting tipping points.
The costs are coming down faster than anyone anticipated.
And they're not just enabling electric vehicles and energy storage.
But they're also changing the way we travel.
We believe that, by 2023, there are going to be 26 million electric vehicles sold globally.
An electric vehicle will be cheaper to the end consumer than a comparable gas-powered
car.
So to that end consumer, you'll be deciding, am I going to spend more for a gas-powered
car that also costs more to refuel and has higher maintenance costs?
Or are you going to spend less on an electric vehicle that also probably accelerates faster?
What a lot of people don't realize is that battery cost declines aren't going to just
stop.
Battery costs are going to continue to fall and make endless applications available.
[MUSIC PLAYING] We think that autonomous taxis are one of
the largest opportunities in the public equity markets today.
We expect autonomous taxis to be available to consumers within the next year or two.
And they'll be extremely cheap.
So the price of personal travel actually hasn't changed in 100 years.
Since the Model T, It's been about $0.70 per mile to drive a personal car.
That's coming down to less than $0.30 per mile.
That's an extremely dramatic decrease.
And that's less than a tenth of the cost of a taxi.
So there are many companies working on autonomous travel today.
And we expect a select group of those to be the winners.
This is a natural monopoly market.
And we actually think the auto market, as a result, will consolidate.
We think that autonomous taxi networks should be valued at $2 trillion today in the equity
markets.
And it's virtually unaccounted for.
In the next 10 years, the value of autonomous taxis could grow to $7 trillion, which is
actually larger than today's energy sector.
Personal travel is about to get much safer, much more convenient, and, most importantly,
much cheaper.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Next-Gen sequencing affects humans, plants,
and bacterial life in a bunch of really interesting, novel ways.
For human beings we're able to develop new types of screens and tests and therapies for
patients that have a whole broad spectrum of different types of diseases.
For plants, we're able to increase productivity and yield of different types of mainstay crops
across the world.
And we can also be able to develop new types of computational techniques to run atop that
data to be able to really give us new insights into the progression of disease.
So 2003 was the scientific community's first attempt at sequencing the entirety of the
human genome in which we discovered that it cost roughly $3 billion to perform that task
and about 13 years of computational power do the same.
So flash forward to nowadays, we've cumulatively sequenced about 2 million whole human genomes.
And we expect that number to get up to around 100 million in 2023, which would expand the
addressable sequencing market from about $3 billion today to a little bit north of $20
billion in five years.
With all of this new data that we're generating, we can leverage new computational techniques
running off of deep learning or machine-learned architecture to be able to go in and yield
actionable information that beforehand wasn't possible.
[MUSIC PLAYING] Only 5% of all monogenic diseases have any
available treatment today.
In most cases, we are addressing the symptoms of disease rather than addressing the underlying
root cause of disease.
Enter CRISPR.
CRISPR is a powerful editing tool for DNA that can easily and inexpensively correct,
delete, or repair genes with precision.
CRISPR is emerging is one of the most promising ways to cure disease from cystic fibrosis
to sickle cell anemia and from cancer to childhood blindness.
So with CRISPR, addressing all 10,000 monogenic diseases could total more than $75 billion
per year in addition to $2 trillion in built-up latent demand.
Health care today addresses the symptoms of disease.
With CRISPR, we'll be addressing that root cause of disease.
[MUSIC PLAYING] When people typically think of robotics, they
think of traditional industrial robots which are caged off.
But collaborative robots, they have sensors on them.
So if they bump into you, they're not going to knock you over.
They'll stop moving.
And they're very simple to program.
Some of them are as easy as, you can take the robot arm, you can move at one place,
tell it to pick something up, move it somewhere else, and tell it to drop it.
Anyone could learn to program it within a few hours as opposed to a traditional robot,
which sometimes takes weeks or even months to get set up.
In 2017, roughly 400,000 industrial robots were sold.
Traditionally, almost all robots have been sold into the auto industry.
But what we're seeing is, with the lower cost of collaborative robots and the ease to retrain
them, this is going to expand far beyond just the auto industry.
And so we'll start seeing it in all types of manufacturing.
ARK forecast that there will be 3.4 million robots sold in 2025.
That's going to supercharge productivity and boost the economy.
[MUSIC PLAYING] 3D printing is totally revolutionizing manufacturing.
With 3D printing, complexity is free.
So you're allowed to create these structures that you could have never created before with
traditional manufacturing.
So the interesting thing about 3D printing is, a lot of people think the opportunity
is over.
There was this period in 2014/2015 where everyone thought there'd be a 3D printer in all of
our houses.
And that never happened.
We don't think it ever will.
The real opportunity for 3D printing is industrial use cases-- so markets like the aerospace
industry or health care, for instance.
Aerospace engines actually, in particular, have lots of complex parts.
And when you 3D print them, you can actually reduce the number of parts that you need.
So GE, for instance, has one part that goes in the turbo prop engine.
It used to be over 800 pieces.
And now it's just 12 with 3D printing.
And with that reduction, you also get 20% less fuel burn.
3D printing is roughly a $7 billion market today.
And we think it could go to over $90 billion in the next five years.
3D printing is going to allow for innovation like we've never seen before in manufacturing.
It's going to allow for new parts with new designs that humans could have never imagined.
[MUSIC PLAYING] So now you've heard our nine big ideas for
2019.
These ideas are at their tipping point.
They're investable today.
They're about to take off.
They may not take off in terms of revenues and earnings right away.
But the market is beginning to understand that there is so much innovation out there
that is not being priced into the market that valuations, multiples are beginning to rise
in anticipation of these transformational opportunities.
[MUSIC PLAYING]