Very interesting report from Reuters today with a few in Wall St seeing the profitability of the sector.
Here’s their introduction
NEW YORK: As a senior vice president at Wachovia and then Morgan Stanley during the dark months of the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis, Derek Peterson watched as colleagues lost their jobs and life savings and wondered if he was next.
At the time, he was managing approximately $120 million in client assets, but was growing disenchanted with what he saw as a U.S. stock market driven by high-frequency trading and algorithms rather than fundamentals. He started looking for other opportunities, and soon stumbled on some of the first legal medical marijuana dispensaries that had opened in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“I started looking at this through a finance guy’s eyes and saw that maybe there was something going on here,” he said.
He soon discovered that dispensaries were bringing in sales of more than $4,000 per square foot, a rate higher than any U.S. retailer but Apple Inc , and more than 12 times the average $325 per square foot among all companies in the sector.
“You had places the size of Starbucks bringing in $15 million a year, which is absurd,” Peterson said.
He quit his day job at Morgan Stanley in late 2010, and in 2012 became chief executive officer and president of Terra Tech Corp, which is now a $247 million company that cultivates medical marijuana and whose shares trade on the over-the-counter market, making it one of the few publicly traded pot stocks.
