"There is no force on earth more powerful than an idea whose time has come."     - Victor Hugo

 

Bots in the News:

Despite significant intraweek volatility the Bot Index declined only 96 basis points, and the broader market fell a mere 15 basis points. Hiwin Technologies and Google were the only losers that declined in excess of 4%. Hiwin fell 5.3% on significantly higher volume on Thursday while Google slipped 4.6%. Hiwin’s moves are generally a result of geopolitical issues in periods of political unrest and entanglements with rival China. Google dropped on Friday with possible attribution to a comment made by Stifel’s NextGen Transport analyst Stephen Gengaro. Mr Gengaro has ridden robotaxi vehicles offered by bothTesla and Waymo. His key takeaways from his experiences pointed to, ultimately, Tesla (TSLA) may have a leg up on the rival.

Patents Ahoy:

Almost two decades ago, my colleague Chris Rowane ran a mutual fund – The Huntington Mid-America Fund, with one of the research criteria being patents. The theory was that smaller company’s stocks could benefit from patents that could spell new products, enhancements to existing products and/or more efficient production processes. At one point Chris’ fund was a performance star and proved the validity of his research methods.

Fast forward to a recent IEEE Spectrum Magazine with a feature entitled ‘Patent Power 2025. The interesting feature cited research by 1790 Analytics that combined ‘pipeline power’ of multiple companies’ number of patents accepted in a given year, growth in the number of annual patents, the diversity of the patents and the variety of the patent’s sources.

The IEEE article took the best rankings of companies in ten industries or source categories. The top two companies within those industries are included below:

Telecom and Internet: Amazon and Snap

Consumer Electronics: Apple and Samsung

Semiconductors: Semiconductor Energy Lab and LAM Research

Automotive: Fox Factory Holdings and Oshkosh Corp.

Conglomerates: Alphabet and Johnson Controls

Biotech and Pharma: J & J and Immatics

Computer Peripherals: Sandisk and Western Digital

Computer Software: Cisco and Microsoft

Universities: Harvard and MIT

Computer Hardware: NVIDIA and Cisco