The world’s next great stock market ‘disruptors’ to make YOU rich: After a

Every now and again, a company comes from out of nowhere and throws a cat among the pigeons. These disruptors have the potential to transform an area of our everyday lives and upend their whole sector – creating an incredible investment opportunity in the process.

Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek provided a perfect reminder of this last week. A fortnight ago, few people had heard of it – and no wonder. It is a small Chinese technology start-up with just a couple of hundred employees and was formed little more than two years ago. 

By Monday, it had knocked a trillion dollars off the value of the world’s biggest technology companies because of the potential it displayed for challenging their supremacy.

DeepSeek appears to have created an AI chatbot tool, which can answer users’ questions, solve mathematical and coding problems and even reason, but at a fraction of the cost that was previously thought possible.

Global investors were left reeling, and although some of the losses have been recovered, financial markets are still catching up with what this means for the technology sector and our lives in general. 

After all, AI looks set to be the trend that overhauls our lives, from the way we communicate, travel and make goods, to the jobs that are available. If the cost of it – and therefore the barrier to entry – is much lower than previously thought, this has huge implications.

It is not possible to invest in DeepSeek as it is not listed on a stock exchange. However, there are scores of fund managers who use their expertise to seek out such disruptors in technology as well as all other sectors.

Wealth & Personal Finance has spoken to fund managers who are finding these innovative companies that could be set to transform everything from flood prevention to policing.

Many of these firms are still in their infancy – and that is both the opportunity and the risk for investors. Early investors stand a chance to make magnificent returns if they fulfil their potential, or lose money if they do not succeed or are superseded by something else.

As a result, as always, you should make sure these investments fit with your appetite for risk before getting stuck in. Holding a range of investments is always key to ensuring you’re not overexposed if one doesn’t work out. You may also prefer to buy a fund or funds containing potential disruptors rather than the individual companies to spread your risk.

If you are a more hands-off investor, rest assured that if these companies do prove their worth, they will end up in the passive index funds when they start to scale up. After all, even companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook (now Meta) started life as small disruptive start-ups.

One final thought before we reveal the spoils: lots of investment trusts that invest in such early-stage businesses are trading on massive discounts.

In other words, the shares can be bought for considerably less than they are worth as measured by the value of their underlying holdings. One reason for this is that their value for investors is in the profits they could yield not today but sometime in the future.

And the value of those future profits is considerably lower while interest rates and inflation are still high. If you think this trend could reverse, now could represent an excellent opportunity to buy at a huge discount. But there is no guarantee that the discount will close.

It is no surprise that some of the mind-boggling disruptors are in the realm of space.

Mark Boggett is the chief executive of Seraphim Space, a firm that invests exclusively in space.

One company in the portfolio is Hubble, which has developed the tools to connect to Bluetooth from space. Bluetooth is a technology that allows users to exchange data between two devices. 

It is commonly used for wireless headphones, computer mice and keyboards, but tends to work only over small distances. If it can connect over thousands of miles through space, it can have all sorts of other uses.

‘Some people use Airtags that use GPS technology so that they can track their luggage or to help them find their keys,’ says Boggett. ‘But these are still relatively expensive – around £20-£30. But Bluetooth technology is much cheaper – closer to £1 – and easy to install. So it could be inserted, for example, in your sunglasses so that you don’t lose them.

‘Or it could be put in parcels so that they don’t get lost – especially useful when deliveries are made by drones and you want to know that they have reached the right destination. They could also be used to track cattle or freight. There are so many…