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Revolutions everywhere and how to invest in them

Cody Willard

Cody Willard

— 7 min read
Revolutions everywhere and how to invest in them

Click here to download the Futr Android or click here for the Futr iPhone app.

First, let me remind you to join me in Vegas in three weeks as I’ll be speaking three times at the Las Vegas Money Show:

Revolutions everywhere and how to invest in them

PCs changed the world. The ability to create, publish, view, manipulate and store documents, spreadsheets, presentations, videos, pictures, music and so on has enabled billions of people to be more productive, dream bigger and live larger in the last thirty years than anything since the advent of steel or maybe even the Renaissance. I personally use a computer for 50-80 hours a week every week for almost my entire professional life, and have made a good living doing so.

Spreadsheets alone changed the world.  How many business models, drug therapy models, interstellar travel models, revenue graphs, pie charts, voter break downs, and so on have been done that never would have been possible without spreadsheets. I use spreadsheets in my life up to 10 or 20 times a month sometimes. I use spreadsheets to model out earnings for companies I invest in and I use them for keeping track of my portfolio and I use them for creating entire business models for companies I create.

The Internet continues to change the world. The ability to network your devices, your content, your data, your very lives, has created dramatic productivity, entertainment, efficiency and all kinds of other enhancements over the last twenty years as it hit critical mass. Between PCs, smartphones, tablets, wearables, Internet of Things appliances, cars, etc there will be literally tens of trillions of devices tapped into the Internet by the end of this decade.

The App Revolution is changing the world. Billions of people open hundreds of billions of apps trillions of times a day, every single day. And it’s been less than a decade since the first iPhone and Android smartphones hit the market. 95% of all mobile phones sold last year were smart phones, up from 91% according to a JP Morgan sellside analyst report I read yesterday. The average smartphone has dozens of apps on it and the average person uses at least five apps a day. Younger folk use more and more often, but even most 60 and 70 year olds use their smartphones and at least a few apps every day. People communicate for free using apps. People use apps to report accidents and crimes and traffic and parties and games. They use apps to stream video, watch on demand video, listen to Sirius satellite radio (think about that one) and new applications for apps are being created every day.

Social networking changes the world. Facebook and Twitter in particular, having far surpassed critical mass and having created two disparate forms of social networking, change the world forever. Facebook and it’s 1.4 billion people using the most innovative and creatively disruptive platform to meet each other makes it almost self-fulfilling prophesy that its de facto standard status for personal social networking will become even more dominant. Twitter’s the celebrity/news de facto standard for finding and following any of the above and they too are self-fulfilling in their ongoing dominance. LinkedIn is probably already at that status for professionals.

Messaging apps are about to change the world. The Messaging Revolution has literally created hundreds of billions of dollars in value for early investors in it and is still just getting started. With apps, smartphones and tablets making it ever easier to engage with people using messaging (not to mention social networking and messaging within social networks like Facebook Messenger and Twitter private/group messaging, and so on), the value proposition and creation mechanisms for messaging are growing exponentially. I’m so convinced that the Messaging Revolution is about to be the next phase of our technology revolution that one of my companies has just rolled out the Futr Messaging App that enables you to send your messages into the future, picking when the recipient gets to see it. I’m on there every day these days sending out video market notes to my followers, so download it for iPhone or Android now and find me on there and let me know what you think.

Messaging through apps on your smartphone, wearables and other devices will be the next to explode in valuation, and you’ll see companies like Snapchat come public in the next year or two. Clearly Twitter and Facebook remain the best two publicly-traded messaging companies. Facebook’s WhatsApp now has 800 million active monthly users according to an update from the company and could surpass 1B later this year. According to Pew Research, while the overall teen (ages 13-17) usage of Facebook is down from a few years ago, it’s still overwhelmingly the most popular social site they use; 71% of teens use the platform. Instagram is the second most popular with 51% followed by Snapchat with 41%. Messaging through apps on your smartphone, wearables and other devices will be the next to explode in valuation, and you’ll see companies like Snapchat come public in the next year or two.

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Click here to download the Futr Android or click here for the Futr iPhone app.

Download the Futr Messaging App, and use the “Find” function to search for “Cody” and Follow me on Futr. It’s just for fun mostly, and I’ll of course make my video snippets and other messages generally informative too. Click here to download the Futr Android or click here for the Futr iPhone app. See you in the Futr!

Five tech trends that will revolutionize the world

The app revolution I started predicting eight years ago when the Apple iPhone first hit is very real. The biggest stock-market bubble of all time that I positioned my portfolio and my subscribers for is building right on schedule. Apple’s about to hit the $1 trillion price target that I first put on it five years ago.

And now I’ve got five new predictions for you, each of which is about to change the world we live in.

Here are five of the most important trends for Revolution Investors to stay in front for the next five to 10 years.

  • . Wearables: I’m quite serious when I write that the Wearables Revolution will create a marketplace that’s measured in trillions of dollars. Let’s assume that the wearables marketplace grows from its current unit sales figures measured in the tens of millions of dollars to there being just one wearable sold for every smartphone sold. That would mean that we’re talking about a billion wearable units sold per year. Google, Apple, Ambarella, Twitter and Sandisk are some of my favorite wearables stocks. I avoid GoPro, which should have been built with an Android operating system that would easily tie into smartphones and tablets. You’ll look back in five years and laugh at how hard it is to manage GoPro content.
  • . Google’s Android: Android’s basically free for developers to use in their wearables, smartphones and other still- unthought-of devices. With my expectations that the wearables market alone will be moving more than a billion units per year in the next couple years and several billion units a year thereafter, we’re talking about perhaps the largest market in the history of the planet. Many of your home appliances and car dashboards will be connected to the Internet and will use Android as their operating system to make up that whole Internet of Things marketplace in the future too. Controlling the operating system on billions of devices will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars 10 years from now. This is Google’s game to lose, and I don’t expect they will, not with such a head start that Android has had.
  • . Big Data: The amount and the types of data that are being collected are about to go exponential. Wearables are going to enable you and companies you choose to collect data about your health, your blood, your activity, your locales and so on. And all that data will be crunched in completely new types of ways using new algorithms and creating trillions of dollars in value. Splunk, IBM, Twitter, Apple and Google are leading plays here. I’ve been short IBM in years past but it’s cheap enough that I’m going to take a fresh look at it as a potential Revolution Investing idea here.
  • . Content is king now more than ever: The Internet Video Revolution is finally hitting its full stride, and Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, Dish (with its Sling TV service), privately held Hulu and others are going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create or license content to their services. Sony and Disney are my two favorite plays on this theme, along with Fox and Discovery.
  • . The Trillion Dollar Social and Messaging Revolutions: Twitter and Facebook are the two social networks that everybody thinks of when it comes to sharing news. I have been a longtime investor in Facebook and recently started buying Twitter, in part, because of their powerful reach in disrupting the control of messaging. Snapchat, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger are driving the next phase of this revolution: messaging. I’m so sure of the value about to be created in the Messaging Revolution that my own company has just rolled one out to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Futr, a messaging app that allows you to schedule when your video, photo or text messages get delivered.

Other investors and traders are trying to game a market top or to day-trade a few points or to time the bottom in energy. I think getting in front of these tech trends that are revolutionizing the world and growing secularly are a much better option

Click here to download the Futr Android or click here for the Futr iPhone app.

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