Want to know what separates a mid-level financial advisor from a major Wall Street hedge-fund manager?
The ability to discern opportunity before the rest of the pack...
It's something not many can do, especially when it comes to investing... It takes a curious alchemy of financial understanding, subject-matter expertise, curiosity, synergetic aptitude, creative imagination and good, old-fashioned entrepreneurship...
If you want insight from this sort of brilliant mind, then I suggest reading Andy Kessler, the former hedge-fund manager.
But if you want to watch an entire firm with these sorts of qualities, the best place to look is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers -- one of the most successful venture capital firms in the world. (A venture capital firm provides financial capital to early-stage, high-potential growth startup companies)
I won't talk too much about Kleiner Perkins, the firm's track record speaks for itself... It was an early investor in Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), AOL (NYSE: AOL), Compaq, Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: GS), Genentech and Intuit, just to name a few.
Then in 1999, long before "Google" was even a verb, Kleiner Perkins paired with Sequoia Capital and paid $25 million for 20% of the search engine -- Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is now worth about $200 billion today.
All told, if you add up all of Kleiner Perkins successful ventures, they have produced 250,000 new jobs, brought in more than $100 billion in new revenue, and created more than $650 billion in market cap.
As the chief investment strategist behind Game-Changing Stocks, I like to see where firms such as Kleiner Perkins are parking their cash -- their long history of savvy investment success is chief among its several areas of distinction.
Right now, Kleiner Perkins invests in four distinct areas: Greentech, China, Digital and Life Sciences... But an overwhelming number of their success has come from high-flying tech start ups.