1. Micro-to-Mid Capitalization Direct Public Investing Discussions: 

Pressure on private company valuations after a series of bubbles in funding over many years. Many of these companies did not even have viable business models and there was no attention to earning a yield over reasonable time frames.

Valuations in larger public companies higher than many smaller companies. Recent political changes revealing more fraud and corruption in larger public companies, creating an opening for off the radar opportunities in smaller public companies.

Inflation and Federal Reserve interest rate hikes amid multiple global crises. Investors seem to believe they managed the impossible, taking valuations up after many years of leaving them low, after creating the everything bubble and then nothing bad happening. That is unlikely to be true. It is a good time to be a contrarian and look for opportunities in new areas away from the herd.

Bubbles in various industries due to excessive funding during boom years. A recent example is all the AI hype, despite the technology not being new and in development for many years.  Long term value creation with AI technologies across industries requires a convergence of many technologies and multi-disciplinary capabilities, not hype that sounds more like a Star Wars movie than an investing thesis. There is and will be plenty of opportunity in this area, but following the herd is dangerous right now. Just because companies seem large and formidable does not mean they can't have dark tower falling moments.

Investment considerations:  

1. Caution against following investment trends blindly.

2. Potential opportunities in undiscovered companies and newly evolving trends in areas highly transformative to society.

3. Expectation of valuation corrections and turnarounds in overvalued areas, especially with so many other issues coming to a head with interrelated global crises.  

Challenges in the market:  

1. Unconventional public offerings (reverse mergers, SPACs) often resulting in value traps.

2. Lack of institutional support for many micro to mid-sized public companies.

3. Illiquidity and vulnerability to market manipulation in smaller markets.  

4. Extreme boom and bust cycles in the regular stock market.

5. Rapid change in new technologies and science is making it harder to pick winners and losers; the past is not a  great guide for future opportunity; the existing experts in siloed research areas are less helpful; and the bubbles accompanying these boom/bust cycles are scaring off many good investors.

6. Extreme divergence between the haves and have nots, where some entrepreneurs in elite crowds get all the attention and resources, where many innovative, off the radar entrepreneurs have exciting innovation, but are neglected and lack resources of many types.

Opportunities:  

1. Potential for venture capital-type returns over shorter timeframes.

2. Focus on opportunities away from the herd across industries with solid research and strategic plans for long term value creation using our complex systems principles as a guide. These principles help both the management teams of the companies as well as investors.

3. Application of complex systems principles to identify diamonds in the rough, company corruption and company weaknesses. Focus on companies that are both coherent and incoherent to identify new breakthrough opportunities with reduced risk. For companies that are incoherent, we use our principles to discover any potential to unlock value if they were brought into coherence.

4. Leveraging systemic thinking and natural intelligence processes to identify new opportunities and identify risks that other investment approaches routinely miss.