We are back to the future ... of work!

Future of Work! Remember that?

If you are an old-timer around here, you know we love to chunk our stock investments into themes. Theme-based investing is a performance-based diversification we pursue to spread our net wide, without sacrificing performance. Traditional diversification strategies segment your portfolio through arbitrary dimensions such as sector or region. Consequently, they sacrifice performance in the name of lower risk. What we do is to pick major themes and trends that are on the rise, and build our portfolio around such. This way, not only we diversify, we also grow faster than the overall market. 

Just before releasing the new version of StockCard.io, we were in the middle of working on the  Future of Work theme. Today, we are picking up where we left! Let's go back to the future... of work! #FutureofWork

When you hear #FutureofWork, what comes to mind? Digital communications, robots, and artificial intelligence all seem interesting. However, if you peel the onion to its core, there is one centerpiece that will shape how we work in the future. And that is... DATA! 

The volume and speed of data generation is so high that you need to use measurement units that are hard to pronounce such as... GIGABYTE (that's not so hard), PETABYTE (Ok, that's a bit strange), EXABYTE (hmm) ... ZETTABYTE (You made your point! Way too many zeros)... The point is, as the volume of data generation grows astronomically, the demand for data storage grows with it. It's not only the data that's in our excel files or phones. It's our data footprint as we move around, and more importantly the data that the machines generate. That's every little sensor we are placing into everything we own, from our cars to our athletic clothing, to the digital dust we spread around in our manufacturing facilities... they are all getting connected, and sending bits and pieces of information back to the servers every nanosecond... and, they are just getting started... it's not just the 'big data' but also the 'fast data', 'smart data'...data, data, and more data.... When the volume goes as high as it is, you cannot just store it, you need smart and well-designed frameworks and systems to store, use, recover, protect, and refresh... And, that's where we cast our net wide for this edition of Stock Card Weekly...

Interestingly, as we've been thinking about data storage stocks, you guys have been coming through. Barry W. sent a Stock Card request for Pure Storage. S Gold had Western Digital on the radar. Ted M. and Jiaduo H. were looking at Intel. We at Stock Card HQ had our eye on Micron Technology. The elders of the industry such as NetApp, Dell and VMWare are not giving up their fortresses. A whole army of startups is putting up a fantastic fight to innovate and disrupt the storage market, among which Nutanix IPO'd last year. 

We are not yet done with the data storage theme, I must say. However, we picked up some shares for our portfolio,  and added a few Stock Cards to the watchlist. To find out more, visit their associated Stock Cards by clicking on their logo above or visiting our website.

What's been on your radar?
We've been having fun running the Stock Card engine that collects, vets and summarizes close to 100 data points about each requested stock. The followings are some of Stock card we published during this past week. More to come in the next few days as we continue answering your Stock Card Requests... Click on the logo to go to the company's Stock Card:

That's it for this edition of Stock Card Weekly. Don't forget to join our Intelligent Investing Facebook Group for daily investing conversations and research. As always: submit a Stock Card request for companies on your radar! 

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