TOP TRUMP CARDS.
Written by: Robert and Russell Markham
As a kid, I loved playing a game called Top Trump Cards. The Top Trump cards game entailed a deck of cards with pictures and statistics on the cards. The cards would cover things such as tanks, ships, aircraft, racing trucks and the likes. My favourite pack of Trump Cards covered aircraft. The aircraft on each of the cards varied from the ultimate brute power of the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird (my favourite aircraft of all time) through to smaller aircraft that were almost comical in their appearance. Each card listed a set of statistics about the aircraft such as max speed, max height, range wingspan and so on. The Blackbird had a top speed of 3,500 Km/h (Mach III). No other aircraft came close to it. In fact, the Blackbird was so fast that no surface to air missile was ever able to shoot it down, it was just too fast and too high flying! It remains the fastest aircraft ever made and it was made in the 1960s! Furthermore, even if you could chase the Blackbird, good luck getting up to the lofty heights of 85,000 feet (25.9 kilometers) which it flew at to intercept it!
The aim of the game was to work out the best feature of your card and then challenge your players to that statistic. If you had the best statistic, you won the other player’s cards. If I had the Blackbird on hand, it was game over. Just about every stat blew the other aircraft away (apart from wingspan). I could call out “Max Speed 3,500 Km/h” and be guaranteed my playing partners would hand over their cards to me. The winner would be the person who acquired all the cards.
Where am I going with this? Well, going back to the Lockheed Martin Blackbird, I was wondering how that company who made that aircraft was doing? Are they still around? What did become of the Blackbird? Sadly, the Blackbird was retired in the 1990s, but the makers of the Blackbird, Lockheed Martin are as strong as ever! Lockheed Martin is in the Aerospace and Defence Industry. If you check out the industries on offer on the ASX, we do not have an Aerospace and Defence industry listed. This is the power of VectorVest and what it offers you through the access to a second country. By default, we give you 2 counties when you subscribe to VectorVest in Australia. Most of you have the US as your second country. If not, and you would like to change your second country to the US, give our team at support a call to switch your second country to the US.
Let’s find Lockheed Martin in VectorVest US. To do so, double click on your VectorVest desktop icon and then click on the US flag and enter in your use name and password, just like you would do when signing into Australia. Then click on the Viewers Tab and then Stock Viewer per the first image in the box. At the top of the page where you see the magnifying glass image, type in LMT and press ENTER on your keyboard. This will bring back Lockheed Martin as the stock ticker code. Scroll over all the way to the right of all the columns (per the bottom of your screen there is an arrow pointing to the right, click on this arrow and hold down you right mouse key, this will scroll across the columns). Keep scrolling across until you are at the very end of all the columns. The last two columns note the industry and sector. You can see that Lockheed Martin is in the Aerospace industry and Sector. Next step double click anywhere on the highlighted row for LMT. This will now open all the Aerospace companies in the US. I get 13 as of 22 October 2019.
Lockheed Martin is coming at number 3 on the list. Very interesting. Let’s look a bit further. Graph the top 5 Aerospace companies as ranked by VST. Set the graph layout to be the VectorVest Simple layout and set the time frame to be 5 years (per the bottom right of the screen there is a 5y button you can select).
Per time of writing, my top 5 by VST Aerospace companies were: RTN, NOC, LMT and BA and QNTQF. They all look very impressive except for QNTQF which is a bit too volatile for my liking. But what about the other 4? They are very impressive indeed.
Here is an interesting fact, if you QuickTest the top 4 (RTN, NOC and LMT and BA) and set your date back to be 3 January 2000 and run the test through to your current date, you will get over 1,000% returns. To do so, click on the drop-down arrow just to the right of the button that notes QuickTest. Set the test to be the Top 4 and then set the start date per the date window to be 3 January 2000 and the end date to be 22 October 2019 and then click on: Run Test. Wow! Some very impressive returns there. You will see Lockheed Martin returns over 1700%! Yes, the makers of the SR-71 Blackbird are well and truly still going strong.
The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird”courtesy of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird
I read on internet the other day that Lockheed Martin is working on the next version of the Blackbird, that being the SR-72. The role of the SR-72 is noted to be: Hypersonic strategic reconnaissance UAV. Wow…I can only imagine what that will entail. Cutting edge technology yet again from Lockheed Martin which no doubt will propel those earnings higher.
VectorVest makes it fun and easy for me to find some of the best stocks out there in industries and sectors out there. By having access to two countries, you are not just limited to finding stocks on the ASX.
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