Washington State’s newly legal cannabis capitalists don’t tend to agree on much. Ask any one of them about any current pot-business topic—the regulation of medical marijuana, indoor versus outdoor grows, whether labs fudge pesticide and potency test results for favored clients—and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a passionate harangue. But the more you talk to them, the more they seem to agree on one refrain: However volatile our market might seem, and however much investment capital is sloshing around trying to turn itself into profit, the big bucks haven’t even shown up yet.
As Gordon Fagras of the lab Trace Analytics put it: “The big players are just standing back. They’ll be coming in slowly, picking up the pieces as other businesses fail.” Because marijuana is still federally criminalized and the market is so young, the heavyweight financiers—in big agriculture, big tobacco, big pharmaceuticals, and big alcohol—are biding their time. But when they arrive, cannabis data analysts like Brian Yauger (of the local company Tetratrak) and Jonathan Rubin (of New York–based New Leaf Data Services) will be rolling out the welcome wagon and trying to turn them into clients.
Read the rest of Brendan Kiley’s article: http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/09/02/22800421/legal-cannabis-creates-yet-another-spinoff-industrywall-street-style-data-analytics
