The pot stocks have been fueled by the number of investments being done on a widespread scale. Not only does this pertain to acquisitions, but the number of investors looking to purchase cannabis stocks as well. All of this has led to one of the friendliest investor markets for finding pot stocks to watch. 

With projections for the cannabis stock market showing billions in revenue in the coming years, we have a lot of good to potentially look forward to. This seems to be extremely contingent on the performance of the market and how well the current deals being made, can go. With that being said, the future of the cannabis stock market seems to be just as bright as the present. 

A Pot Stock Investment Company to Watch 

SOL Global Investments Corp. (SOL) (SOLCF Stock Report) is a cannabis investment stock working out of both the international and domestic market within the U.S. The company works in the hemp and CBD market which has proven itself to be quite lucrative. The company is currently working on a research and development project with the esteemed University of Miami. 

The goal with this is to form a comprehensive approach to building out a brand for the future of the industry and SOL Global Investments. As a leading investment company in the pot stock market, SOL Global Investments is responsible for locating high quality assets around the cannabis stock industry. The company has chosen to work in the European market as well which they have seen a lot of growth potential in. For now, they remain a key pot stock to watch. 

A Big Investment for SOL Global Investments 

The company recently announced that they have invested around $2 million in a capital infusion into CannCure Investments Inc. This investment should see the two companies working to accelerate the construction of their newest One Plant dispensaries located in California. 

For those who don’t know, the Californian marijuana stock market is the largest in the world and looks like it could continue to be that way moving forward. Wit this investment, SOL Global Investments will also indirectly hold 100% of 3 Boys Farms, LLC. This company is a holder of three vertically integrated medicinal marijuana treatment center licenses which is a big deal. All in all, SOL Global Investments remains a key pot stock to watch. 

A Big Pot Grower to Watch 

Aurora Cannabis (ACB Stock Report) is one of the largest pot stock growers in the industry. The company has stated that they have the potential to out out as much as 625,000 kilograms of output by the end of June of 2020. With this production, they should become one of the top three producers in the whole of the market. 

The company has been able to scale up their operation with a massive amount of growth efficiency. In their one facility known as Aurora Sky, they have put able to put out around 125 grams per square foot. This is way above the average yield, and makes them a definite marijuana stock to watch.

In 2017, the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Poison Control Center received 40,724 phone calls, according to government statistics: harried school nurses, baffled physicians, and worried members of the general public wondering what you do when someone ingests a bottle of something they ought not have.

Of these calls, 3,832 — or fewer than 10% — resulted in a visit to the emergency room, though 5,399, or about one in eight, resulted in a hospitalization. Still, two-thirds of “poisonings” in these two states were handled successfully at home, work, school, or wherever the toxin was ingested.

What are people eating or drinking? Drugs, mostly. Fifty-six percent of poison-control center calls — more than 20,000 incidents — resulted from exposure to analgesics, antidepressants, sedatives and anti-psychotics, cardiovascular drugs and antihistamines. Cosmetics, pesticides, industrial-strength cleaners, plants and the occasional swallowed toy made up the other 44%, according to Mass.gov.

Parsing these statistics, one could conclude that many common household items are bad and/or dangerous and ought to be handled with more care. Pharmaceutical drugs seem particularly dangerous — worse than bleach and motor oil and even cell phones!

It would take a certain type of myopia or fanaticism to ignore all that and worry instead about a substance that led to 37 calls — or 0.0925% of the total. Yet that’s exactly what Massachusetts media outlets did last week, led by The Boston Globe and a particularly alarmist article in the Journal of American Medicine.

Of course, those 37 calls involved cannabis.

Thirty-seven times since November 2018, when recreational cannabis shops finally opened up in Massachusetts, someone called poison control to report a child under 5 years old had ingested cannabis.

Here’s the Globe:

The numbers jumped from 13 calls about children 5 and younger ingesting marijuana from December 2017 to June 2018 to 37 calls from December 2018 through June, which is more than one call a week.

Overall, calls about these very young children accounted for more than 25 percent of all the marijuana-related calls the center recorded in those seven months, compared with just 14 percent during the same period in 2018. The total number of marijuana calls to the poison control center rose by more than 58 percent.

Social scientists would call these jumps “statistically significant.” And they are, in an extremely narrowly focused context. This would still seem to be an example of a nearly invisible problem becoming ever-so-slightly less minuscule. Yet it was the availability of cannabis edibles, and how to keep them away from children, that led the Globe’s front page on Aug. 17 — not exposure to any of the hazardous substances that make up thousands or even hundreds of calls.

“We can’t believe all these children who are going to the hospital and have to be admitted to the intensive care unit because they are so lethargic their parents are unable to wake them up, or they’re reporting seizure-like activity,” Adina Sheroff, a registered nurse and poison specialist who works at the poison-control center told The Globe, whose reporter appears to have worked extra hard to find alarmists — of which there were plenty available!

“We do consider having edibles available to a child similar to putting alcohol in a baby bottle,” said Heather Forkey, a physician and director of the child protection program at UMass Memorial Children’s Medical Center told the newspaper.

Readers of this publication likely need no explanation as to why the alcohol analogy is foolish and irresponsible. Alcohol kills many thousands of Americans every year; cannabis still kills nobody. As for the fate of these children, the Globe doesn’t say, but it’s likely they turned out just fine.

Between 2009 and 2016, the poison-control center received 218 calls regarding cannabis, according to research recently published in JAMA. And “in terms of medical outcomes, most of the exposures resulted in moderate and minor effects,” according to JAMA. “Four cases with major effects and no deaths were reported.”

It’s very hard to make a case that a major “poisoning” every other year represents a threat to public safety. What the increase does represent, experts like Sheroff told the Globe, is a clear cultural shift with more cannabis products available and adults taking poor care in securing them.

That seems true and troubling, for the parents as much as anyone else; one doctor told the Globe that she reports all such incidents to child-welfare officials. But again, zooming out at the bigger picture, it’s difficult to make an intellectually honest case that cannabis is the problem to focus on here.

The cannabis-related statistic is tiny, insignificant compared to the threats posed by other far more toxic and far more widely available items.

Focusing on weed in this scenario is sort of like publishing a story about a Hong Kong traffic jam rather than the ongoing protests there, or a special report about trash floating in the Amazon while the rainforest burns down. These are issues, issues that people may even care about; there are far more pressing things right in front of you that escape scrutiny.

Responsible cannabis use is absolutely something to work towards, but it seems impossible to prevent all accidental cannabis exposures without draconian, invasive, or unworkable prohibitions. (Reporting parents who report their children’s exposures to DCF may incentivize parents to simply not seek medical attention; then what?) What instances like this reveal, rather than public-health threats, is ideology. And this was a diagnosis made decades ago.

The wholesale market for legal cannabis is marked by great regional variation, but the oversupply that has sent prices plummeting in Oregon and other Western states has not been able to dampen the general upswing on the national level. 

Amid stratospheric hopes for the industry’s growth, there have been growing fears of a market correction. An account on Motley Fool notes that investment bank Stifel foresees $200 billion in global annual adult-market and medical cannabis sales within a decade — amounting to a compound annual growth rate of nearly 34%. In addition, the U.S. is projected to generate between a third and a half of worldwide legal sales within that same timeframe.

But the report warns that the famous oversupply in Colorado, Washington and especially Oregon —itself  “a result of everyone wanting in on cannabis” — may be undermining the dream.

Regional and Seasonal Variation

In response to the flooded market, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) announced in May that it was to suspend the processing of license applications as of June 15. Back in January, the OLCC reported that the state was producing two times more cannabis than was being consumed —with more than six years’ worth of supply wasting away at farms, warehouses and retail outlets.

The market reaction to overproduction is noted by New Frontier Data. Hardly surprisingly, Oregon saw a 64% decline in wholesale prices from October 2016 to March 2019, while Colorado experienced a 60% drop from January 2015 to April 2019. However, the “downward slides in wholesale prices are not linear, but in both cases reflected seasonality.” Prices partially recovered in both states in the second and third quarter of this year. And in March, Oregon wholesale prices matched Colorado’s for the first time.

The report notes that a moment of reckoning looms with the approaching harvest season in Oregon (more of an issue than in Colorado where only indoor is permitted). “Will it lead to further price declines, or are prices in both Colorado and Oregon bottoming out?”
 
As New Frontier Data’s vice president Beau Whitney writes in an analysis for Bezinga this week, “Oregon’s woes are directly attributable to the (originally unlimited) number of licensed cultivators in its program.” Whereas Colorado had guarded itself against glut by requiring any growers applying for an increase in capacity to demonstrate proven demand for their previous crop.

In Colorado, where legalization took effect in 2014, it took until 2017 for the state’s legal market to effectively absorb the pre-existing illicit market, with legal supply effectively meeting demand. This more cautious approach has led to a somewhat more stable market.

On a national level, Cannabis Benchmarks finds that the simple average wholesale price increased $65 to $1,557 per pound by August this year. The lower prices in the western states are in part offset those on the East Coast. Marijuana Business Daily, citing interviews with local industry leaders, reports a range from $2,000 a pound for the medical market in Maryland to as high as $4,200 per pound for the adult-use market in Massachusetts. This contrasts Colorado, where last month the wholesale price stood at $850.

There is also a considerable price differential between indoor (the most highly valued), greenhouse-grown (the middle range) and outdoor (least valued, however disappointing this news will be to its hardcore aficionados). 

As Cannabis Benchmarks writes: “California’s market has seen a surge of sun-grown supply recently as light-deprivation harvests are dried, trimmed, and brought to market… In contrast, Oregon and Washington state reported transaction stats indicate that wholesale buyers continue to favor indoor flower this summer, with increasing relative volumes of such product helping to push up Spot prices in those markets.”

Even though some may consider having a bad trip as normal, wouldn’t it be amazing if a person could learn how cannabis affects them before they even tried it? No more anxiety attacks, paranoia, bodily discomfort… a world without bad cannabis trips.

Lobo Genetics, a Toronto-based healthcare technology company, claims it has the answer: DNA testing. The startup, founded in 2018, announced last November Charles Sousa, Ontario’s former finance minister, was joining the board.

“When we look at the available data on how cannabis might react person-to-person, it’s not entirely useful as the information is largely anecdotal,” says John Lem, CEO of Lobo Genetics. Cannabis affects people differently: Some may have the best time of their life; others might feel trapped in a downward spiral. “But by better understanding your genetic markup, it can be a completely different experience. There has been a lot of focus on the genetics of plants, but not many are talking about what the impact on the users is like,” Lem adds.

Similar to the immensely popular 23andMe, a California-based genomics and biotech company, Lobo Genetics aims to help people understand their response to recreational cannabis through a DNA test.

Costing $59, the test helps determine an individual’s tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) genetic profile through a cheek swab. As per a 2019 study using rats by Western University in London, Ont., THC, a cannabis compound known for its mind-altering effects, plays a key role in an individual’s psychological reactions to cannabis.

The four-inch cube used to process the test kits at Lobo Genetics.

The conclusion of the DNA analysis is followed by a curated list of products based on the individual’s profile, with strain listings being linked directly to government-run platforms like Ontario Cannabis Store, where interested users can make a purchase.

The results of the DNA tests are delivered within a couple of days and can be accessed through a smartphone. The profile provides information on sensitivity to THC by examining reactivity to three genes:

CYP2C9 produces an enzyme that helps break down THC in the body. The test can reveal if a person is a normal, slow or a very slow metabolizer of THC. A slow metabolizer profile, for instance, will feel the effects of cannabis through sublingual, vaping or smoking for a longer duration and at a slightly higher intensity.

AKT1 has been linked to causing psychosis in regular cannabis users. The test evaluates normal, intermediate and high risk when evaluating cannabis interaction with this gene. Results indicating “high risk” mean a person can experience short-term psychotic symptoms and long-term psychosis from THC.

COMT affects memory and cognitive functions. A high-risk profile indicates a person may experience impairments that could include short-term memory loss, poor reaction time, and difficulty paying attention.

John Lem, CEO of Lobo Genetics. The company was founded in 2018 and later that year announced the addition of Charles Sousa, former Ontario finance minister, to the board.

No stranger to the genetic space, Lem has over 15 years of experience in the industry. He is also the co-founder of Ottawa-based Spartan Bioscience, a sample-to-result DNA testing system. Spartan Bioscience unveiled what it calls the “world’s smallest DNA tester,” a four-inch DNA testing cube, in 2016, that can test for a range of human diseases in less than half an hour. Licensing the technology from Spartan, similar-looking four-inch cubes are used to process the test kits at Lobo Genetics.

When it comes to the target audience, the service appeals mostly to adults under the age of 45. “It’s skewing towards couples. Recreational cannabis is often consumed socially, and we are finding that people want to know how they respond,” he says. “Parents are also keen to learn more. They are concerned about people in their lives that are using cannabis who are in universities, or mid- to late 20s, and they want to understand better.”

Lobo Genetics is in the process of developing CBD genetic test kits. Meanwhile, the THC kits are available for purchase online and in select stores in Alberta.