In our economy there are many trends going on, for many of them we will not know how to profit by them because we are not positive how to make money from it. However in the economy somebody will try and if they succeed, the companies will be on written about. One of the methods we can try to figure out what companies to invest in or to try to avoid is read books such as Microtrends Squared – the new small forces driving today’s big disruptions written by Mark Penn with Meredith Fineman, published by Simon & Schuster, NY, 2018. The book is divided into 6 sections – Love and Relationships; Health and Diet, Technology, Lifestyle, Politics and Work and Business. The great thing about the topics is we can able identify with some part. The more difficult question is what do you do about it? The problem is for every move or desire to move in one direction seems to inspire a countermovement by another group in the opposite direction.

In the information age – there is also a disinformation age. By offering as many choices under the sun, people are making fewer choices. Would one expect that advances in our ability to customize goods and services would open the world to never ending experimentation, but the people are finding what they like and sticking to their choices over and over again.

If you have a smartphone, for marketers, it is the ultimate spy. In the years ahead data will be the precious asset on the planet. Data allows the on-demand service to give you the right thing at the right time and the data makes the system work. The better its resolution, the better the targeting and the fatter the profits for someone in the digital chain.

An example is a leading elevator company has linked all its elevators they have installed or serviced in the world. They get data about every trip every elevator makes and this makes sense in terms of elevator maintenance. The data is becoming increasing valuable for other things such as AI and facial recognition and encoded fobs tell them where people are going and can calculate the loads on the elevators. If an elevator company can do this for its services, what can other companies do? The trend is what you think a company is personalizing for you is actually profit-maximizing for the company. If they work hand in hand, no one minds, but… The concern is a growing market concentration in the tech industry. One company is selling 50% of on line goods. On company has 98%of the search engine worldwide. In theory the power of the top 5 tech companies is mushrooming. Invest now.

We now the baby boom generation after WW II is 60 years older or more – there is a lot of people with wide interests and in general the older you are the more conservative you become. Some are empowered with technology, some are not and that changes voting.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in each category of the microtrends square are things that are happening and some companies will cater to the changes. Which area you spend the greatest amount of time in, you should look at what companies can benefit and which are benefiting from the changes. Also do your existing investments in companies are they adjusting or not and do you like it. If they are seeing and doing something maybe they are keepers, if the industry is ripe for disruption, then find alternatives.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.