Despite all my harsh criticisms and outright anger over bailouts, corporatist government policies, a race to devalue our nation’s currency, zero percent interest rates enabling public debt creation that our grandchildren will have to pay back and so on…
For the last twenty years, I’ve often written and said on TV that “There’s never been a better time and place to be alive than right here in the US, right now.” I have bet my career and money on continued technological revolutions creating prosperity and wealth. Over the last dozen years or so, I’ve been betting that career and money on such big drivers as the Search Revolution, the iPod Revolution, the Internet Video Revolution, the Smartphone Revolution, the Cloud Revolution, the App Revolution among others. Trillions of dollars of market value have been created by the companies that have driven these revolutions.
A few themes stick out when I look at the history of Tech Revolutions over the last twenty years. One is that the big get bigger and it’s often a winner-takes-all or sometimes two or three winners take all. Another important theme is that even within these revolutions that end up creating long-term trillion dollar values, there are cycles of boom, bust, bubble and crash. How many times has Apple, Amazon, Google and crashed over the many years that I’ve owned them, only to come back and hit new highs as their earnings and/or revenue growth rocked everybody’s world’s over the years. And you have to be careful not to get into tech revolutions too early. Here’s a great comment and picture that I saw on Scutify today:
LunaticTrader – Who doesn’t remember 1963? A Luxemburg born inventor demonstrated his “television goggles”, now better known as a VR headset. He was only 50 years too early with his idea. His name was Hugo Gernsback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… #VR
You need to be careful about picking the technological revolutions you invest in. 3-D printing investors have learned the hard way that if you invest too early in the revolution, however real it ultimately might turn out to be, that you can still lose your shirt if the tectonic plates aren’t actually moving yet. In contrast, you can already see the technological tectonic plates shifting for a Virtual Reality Revolution that will change the way we watch movies, surf the Internet, do surgery and socialize on Facebook.
The fact remains there has never been so many tech revolutions setting up to boom over a five to ten year period as there are right now. Each of the following six Tech Revolutions are likely to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue up and down the economy, from supply and demand and components and software and services and maintenance and security and so on. I put a couple of tickers to watch for each sector and in coming weeks, I’ll feature each of the following Tech Revolutions and the ways to invest in them in much more detail.
Artificial Intelligence – IBM IBM, Nvidia NVDA, Microsoft MSFT, Facebook FB, Google GOOGL.
Chatbots – Facebook, Microsoft, TenCent.
Virtual Reality – Facebook, Sony SNE, Nvidia, Google.
Wearables – GoPro GPRO, Sony, Ambarella AMBA, Google, Nuance NUAN.
Drones – Aero AVAV, Amazon AMZN, GoPro, Ambarella.
Robotics – Intuitive Surgical ISRG, iRobot IRBT, Mazor Robotics MZOR, Honda HMC.
I don’t suggest going out and blindly buying all the stocks in each of these Tech Revolutions. We’ve got to do homework on each company’s strategies, technological roadmaps, defensive moats, critical mass, platform creations and so on. I work on this stuff all day every day and here’s what I can tell you:
There’s never been a better time to be a Revolution Investor in the history of the planet than right here, right now.