Greg Miller

We've talked about some of the last hurdles the cannabis industry has to clear before it can achieve two important, related goals:

Reach its full, projected $146 billion potential.

Hand investors returns that could ultimately dwarf everything that's come before.

Of course, the descheduling and legalization of pot at the federal level would take us a long way toward clinching those ambitions.

But almost as importantly, marijuana businesses need free and full access to the banking sector, just like any other legitimate American enterprise.

As it stands now, cannabis firms – completely legal in their respective states – cannot use banking services, because the money would cross state lines and expose both the business and the bank serving it to federal racketeering and money-laundering charges.

As we've discussed, this forces marijuana companies to operate on a cash-only basis, which brings with it a slew of unique and, more importantly, expensive challenges; those "challenges" are essentially taking money out of shareholders' pockets.

Some small, regional, and local banks have boldly stepped in to serve these perfectly legal businesses, but the approach has been more or less piecemeal.

Well, a monumentally important congressional vote this past Friday stands to change all that. It's going to change everything, in fact.

This is the "light at the end of the tunnel"; it's confirmation that our investing approach is fully sound.