Howard
I think we both have experience of "see(ing) what friends and associates buy and more importantly what motivates their buying". To be realistic there aren't many people in the UK who don't have this experience.
Have you ever been a senior manager or director of a medium or large manufacturing company and been part of a team tackling the type of manufacturing issues we discuss in your thread? Maybe Production Control Manager of a major US owned plant or Director of a UK manufacturer?
Have you been inside a number of high tech manufacturing companies in California and the Boston area and had the chance to look at their processes?
The number of folk who can go from seeing what people buy, to making money with investments/trading is small.
Most of my management experience has been in research groups, supervising PhD students, project managing a NASA subcontracted experiment. During this kind of research I have seen all manner of technologies, most of which took (is taking) decades to get into practical and routine use. I hold patents.
Nowadays I prefer to be self employed. I have several nano scale business that make things, produce honey bee derived products etc in addition to various fiction writing projects and investment/ trading.
Regards,
