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.

You will likely have or heard people talking about watching a movie on Netflix. In the book, the author says 40% of all internet traffic today is generated by Netflix alone. But Netflix does not have the only business model – Cable TV made people pay for a tasting menu with lots of courses, whether they wanted them or not. Netflix has a similar all-you-can-eat model for the cord-cutting generation. iTunes illustrates the pay-per-unit business model. Amazon created a mix of both, giving Prime members the older content for free and charging per piece on the new stuff.

In the internet bandwidth, one minute of video essentially uses all of the internet bandwidth that years of email would require. In the third quarter of 2017, Netflix reported having 109.25 million streaming subscribers compared to 11.17 million in 2011. Since 2012, Netflix has been producing its own content and reaped major rewards. At the moment the average American is watching 5 hours of TV a day. This means TV producers can win big, even if the show has a small following.

When the baby boom generation was young, many of them read comic books. Comic books turned to movies and Marvel Cinematic Universe has brought in $12 billion in worldwide box office receipts – to say nothing of the billions more in merchandise. The movies also created conferences or comic-con events. Thousands of people spend millions of dollars on their favorite movies and pay to take pictures and autographs of the actors who portrayed the characters.

There are many other trends covered in the book, but these ones highlight why technology companies including Disney need to be either in your investment portfolio or on your radar. Does anyone believe they will not be around in 10 years plus?

Linking to dividend paying stocks, when a company consistently earns a profit it is easy to sit back and continually collect it. However the economic world continues to change and the issue is how does the company adapt to the changes. In the book microtrends there are forward trends and pushback to the trends. What aspect do you think the companies you invested in are doing? how well are they capturing the trends in the industry as you see them. Most of do not know which trends will lead and which trends are not very profitable for the average investor and this means you need to keep doing your homework.

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