The Harvard Professor’s Stock Pick
Timothy Springer is an immunologist and Latham Family Professor at Harvard Medical School. There’s no data to suggest that big brains correlate with big gains. You don’t need an IQ of 150 to be a great investor, but you do need Springer’s sponge mentality and drive.
You gotta be a fanatic for learning (Invstr Academy, anyone?), you gotta have patience and let the facts talk, and you gotta have your own area of interest to glean your ‘edge’ and form the core of a strong circle of competence. Professor Springer has just that in immunology. This guy knows his stuff, and now he’s a very rich man.
The coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best in his healthcare-heavy portfolio. He invested in Moderna in 2018 when it went public for the first time. The company now pioneers the “mRNA-1273” vaccine, an antidote worth $400 million to the government. The stock’s shot up over 1,700% since IPO-ing, making Springer a billionaire. But he doesn’t care.
“I’m an academic. All my friends are academics. It doesn’t behove me to be flashy.” This guy invests for the investing; the money is just his scorecard, so there’s a good chance he’ll give the gains away when he cashes out.
It’s a question of timing. He may have to be quick. There are plenty of business tycoons whose billionaire status is in doubt beyond the pandemic, like Zoom founder Eric Yuan. If babies don’t get the jab after the rest of us are immune, what kind of shelf life has Moderna’s creation really got, and what if herd immunity render vaccines obsolete?
The Harvard immunology professor probably has that one figured out!
