Pondering the Big Market Call of the Next Decade…

I didn’t mean to mislead you with the headline, I will not be throwing out any “Big Market Calls” in this post.  But I do plan to start thinking about the mega-themes, supercycles, millennial waves and tsunami trends that could end up being this year’s or this decade’s biggest investment winners.

There are no shortage of candidates already.  I plan to focus on these 8 as a starting point:

1.  Virtualization/ Cloud Computing

2.  Agriculture/ Malthusian Food Catastrophe

3.  The Deleveraging/ Saving Theme

4.  Natural Gas as US Energy/Terrorism Savior

5.  Nanotechnology (yeah, that one’s still kicking around)

6.  Genome/ Stem Cell Breakthrough Explosion

7.  Mobile Internet

8.  Urbanization of Global Populations

These are all well-known and much discussed investment ideas, but they’re worth looking at even though this coming decade’s big opportunity is probably eluding most of us even as I write.

Yesterday, Bloomberg picked up on a post I did congratulating a team of Goldman Sachs researchers who coined the term BRIC for Brazil, Russia, China and India back in 2001 and wrote the definitive series of papers on why those were fertile markets for investment.  In my opinion, this call was the Biggest Market Call of the Decade.

It’s worth noting that while many were aware of the potential growth of these countries and the favorable demographics involved, back in 2001 these markets were still very foreboding to most stock investors, both individual and institutional.  With that in mind, what markets or sectors are the least attractive and most off-putting to investors now?

Read Also:

Goldman Makes Call of the Decade by Promoting “BRICs”  (Bloomberg)

The Biggest Market Call of the Decade  (TRB)