When I was finishing high-school, my friends and I would discuss our gap years and where we'd go. Everyone else was flying to Europe, with plans to work behind the bar in London and hop over to Paris on the weekends. But I was set on America.
I touched down in New York in late May 2003.
I grabbed my backpack and made my way through the crowds. I took a bus, then an elevated train, and finally ended up on the subway, which dumped me out at 14th street. I had no idea how to deal with the subway, but I had memorised the Manhattan street system, so I began walking. Eighty blocks later, I ended up at my hostel. I watched a game of pickup basketball, ate a chocolate bar from the corner deli, and promptly fell asleep.
I was in love. America, a country built on the American dream. New York, the "concrete jungle where dreams are made of," although that song wasn't out yet.
New York, where a bronze 'charging bull' statue with sharp horns and flared nostrils, sitting by Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, is visited a thousand times a year, revered as a symbol of the energy, strength, and unpredictability of the stock market.
That summer, I criss-crossed America, visiting 33 states along the way.
I went to San Francisco, near which Steve Jobs, a college dropout who went travelling through India seeking enlightenment, could go on to found Apple, now the largest company in the world (by market capitalisation), and Pixar, now owned by Walt Disney (also a mammoth company).
I went to Portland, near which Phil Knight, a college track star, co-founded Nike, with a simple premise: "I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful."
I went to Seattle, where I had a coffee at the first Starbucks. Starbucks was just a simple coffee shop until 1987, when the owners sold it to Howard Schultz, who grew up in a public housing project in Brooklyn. Schultz repositioned Starbucks as a social hub, turned it into the behemoth we know today, and took it public just five years later. By the time I visited, it was on the verge of 6,000 locations in North America.
I went to Boston, where just a few months later Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would court controversy for the first time when he created and published Facemash, a website that let Harvard students judge and rank the attractiveness of each other. It was the same summer that MySpace, the social network that would eventually be completely dwarfed by Facebook, launched.
It was the same summer, Time magazine offered 'fearless forecasts' in the world of science, medicine, tech and more. It noted that 'cars that drive themselves' were a sample of the 'future that wasn't.' Little did it know that only a few months before, an unknown company called Tesla Motors was incorporated in California. Tesla is now one of many car manufacturers attempting to be the first to realise full autonomy.
That we, at Spaceship, have just launched our US Investing service is no accident.
The US stock market is jam-packed with dreamers, visionaries and superstars, in terms of founders and CEOs and companies. Many of these companies have 'where the world is going' potential, and when they do, they might find their way into our Spaceship Universe Portfolio or Spaceship Earth Portfolio.
But the US market is also a 'land of opportunity' — and not everything can make its way into our Spaceship Voyager portfolios. There are hundreds of stocks and ETFs out there, meaning hundreds of opportunities if you dare to take your investments a step further.
Our US Investing service enables you to do that. (You can explore for free; you won't be charged a fee unless you start to invest.*)
But it also enables much more: investing is power.
When you invest, you take a stake in a company, even if it's tiny. And by owning a stake in a company, you can have the ability to vote on that company's direction. You put your money where your mouth is — whether you're investing because you believe in the company, or because you see a trend taking shape, or simply because you and your friends binge-watched every episode of Stranger Things and Netflix makes sense to you.
When I left America in 2003, I felt forever changed — by my travels and by America. I ended up moving there for several years, and to this day, I've spent more time in America than anywhere other than Australia. It has its weaknesses in politics and beyond, but there's no doubt it is a country that inspires generations — and our US Investing service helps unlock the role you can play in that.
The US Investing service is currently only available to Spaceship Voyager customers.
