Vic H @Vic5557: What industries/fields do you feel have the most growth potential in 5 year horizon?
ANSWER:
I am going to write more about this on stock-related websites but the industries and companies that I think will do the best in the next five to fifteen years are:
A) Fracking. Most people are worried about fracking as a pollutant. But the latest technologies in fracking have solved just about every issue conceivable. It turns out that the United States probably has more oil left than Saudi Arabia and we are at inning one in drilling for it thanks to this year’s advances in fracking technology. This is how you solve an energy crisis. You reduce dependence on the Middle East where we are constantly fighting wars and worried about terrorism. You increase the supply of oil so it gets dirt cheap. And wealth comes to the country so you can focus on spending it on sustainable energy solutions. Fracking will do this.
B) Diagnostics of Age-related diseases. The baby boomers are retiring now at a rate of tens of millions a year. Economists complain (what else do they do?) that the “job participation rate” is going down because people have given up. That’s not the reason. It’s because baby boomers are retiring. And what happens after they retire? They get cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and other age-related diseases.
The best cure is prevention. Companies are spending billions on developing drugs that cure these various diseases. But more important than finding the cure is finding the disease. Being able to prevent a disease before it starts is the key to a long life. So diagnostics companies will massively succeed. The best innovations in this space are in personalized medicine, genomics, etc and there are new technologies being developed successfully every year. This will be a huge boom.
C) Social media marketing. When you advertise on the Super Bowl, you spend millions, hit 100 million people, and then have no way of every communicating with that customer again, or knowing how well your ad did. When you advertise on Facebook, you can reach out to a billion people, you get a customer that you know everything about, and you can continue to communicate that customer for free for the rest of their lives. Again, we are at inning one of people using social media (combined with mobile) to reach out and touch the people who we can really help (“advertising” will fade into “helping”). The social media agencies that were at the forefront have been bought. So inning zero is over. But inning one is just beginning.