Additive Manufacturing, 3D Printing, and the Coming Stock Market Boom (ePub)

We're at the dawn of a new era: additive manufacturing allows us to create objects by programming and then printing them layer by layer.

The way we make things hasn't changed much since the days of a stone axe, made by bashing two rocks against one another. We take something big and make it useful by cutting, chiseling, drilling, and otherwise reducing it. We accept a huge amount of waste and severe technical limitations: for example, it may be impossible to drill an S-shaped passage through a solid piece of material.

Now, think of printing a page on a dot-matrix printer, which delivers a multitude of color dots to a blank page. Imagine that this printer works in 3-D, printing one level on top of another, building a three-dimensional object, layer by layer.

Such technology already exists; you can already buy and use a 3-D printer.

This technology is overturning the key manufacturing principle of the past million years. Our ability to create new objects will soon be limited only by our ability to program them. We can create objects that are as complex on the inside as on the outside.

For example, rather than driving to the hardware store to buy a wrench, we'll have a 3D printer and download a file to print the tool we need. Not only will we save energy, we'll need to buy less: you won't have to get a complete socket set when all you need is a single size. Manufacturing will return to the US since it will cost roughly the same to print something in Detroit as in China but the shipping cost will be lower and time will be saved.

The coming technological revolution will change our lives. Along the way it'll fuel a stock market boom. This e-book will help prepare you for the great ride ahead and introduce you to the stocks of this looming bull market.

SECOND EXPANDED EDITION, OCTOBER 2012 adds new chapters on:home-building, the military, companies outside the US and unlisted companies in the US.

While additions are sprinkled throughout this book, the expanded chapters are: The tipping point, A meeting with a founding father, Medicine and dentistry, and The AM stocks to watch. All stock charts have been updated to reflect current market action. There are nearly 40 illustrations and links to a dozen videos.