As a personal finance blogger, I should be encouraging you to put your money in index funds with low expenses. It’s one of the few things that nearly all personal finance people agree upon. For example, this Lazy portfolio is built with almost all Vanguard funds.
That’s boring. While boring may be best, let’s pretend that your investing tastes are a little more crazy than the basic bread and water. Let’s say you want to spice it up. After a 10-year bull market, I’m managing stock market risk different nowadays.
I don’t believe that means that you have to sit back in extremely conservative investments and wait for a crash. You could have made to case to do that in 2015 and you would have missed out on years of great growth.
Instead, I’m combining the ideas of managing the risk with some investing ideas that I think will pay off by 2030.
Environmental Trends
We may or may not get a green new deal. Even if we don’t, anyone with any kind of intelligence is delivering warnings about the effects of climate change. For once, it isn’t just landing on deaf ears. Companies are changing how they operate. Microsoft vowed to undo all the carbon emmissions it has ever created by 2050.
Solar stocks would figure to one the big winners of the next 10 years. I recommended investing in solar in 2015 and feel even more strongly about it now. My investing pick is the Invesco Solar ETF (Ticker: TAN) which I’ve personally held for a long time. It’s expense ratio is a little high at 0.7%, but I think it’s worth it. I don’t know much about individual solar companies, so this is one way that I can simply invest in the whole trend.
Over the last few years, I’ve read that a lack of water is going to be the Next Big Trend. We saw a little of this with the Cape Town water crisis a couple of years back. I have to admit, conserving water is an old story. I remember hearing about it more than 35 years ago when I was 7. I don’t think Americans have done a great job of conserving water, and yet here we are, still with water.
Despite that, I’m going to trust the smart people in the room on this. Water management is going to be a very big business over the next 20 years. I’m just starting to look into how to invest in water. From what I’ve found, it seems like Investco’s PIO is the most well-rounded ETF for your investment dollar.
Emerging Markets
I opened the article with the mention of the US market’s decade-long bull run. By now that is common knowledge. During these last ten years, emerging markets haven’t fared quite as well. I’m expecting them to catch up. You likely already have some emerging markets in your portfolio anyway. I think many people could spice it up by increasing their asset allocation to include more emerging markets.
Vanguard’s Health Care ETF
It feels like an unusual time to recommend investing in a health care ETF like Vanguard’s VHT. It’s been up sharply over the last decade. I was on the fence about including VHT, but decided to add it in at the last minute. The nation is getting older and health care keeps marching on with the discoveries. With advances like CRISPR and gene therapy becoming possibilities there’s a lot of room for advancement.
Final Thoughts
I wanted to include a few more trends in this such as ride sharing and social media. Even though I personally invest a little money in these, I don’t feel comfortable suggesting them to others. The ride sharing companies are losing lots of money and it will be a while before they can make significant profits. Social media has a dark cloud of government legislation hanging over it.
What are some of your favorite places to invest in 2030? Let me know in the comments.
i bought a solar related company, SEDG. they make the power inverters for solar cells to increase efficiency. you can’t just collect sunlight, you have to turn that into DC power and then to AC power. we own a lot of fin-tech as the u.s. is becoming a more cashless society. the rest of the world hold plenty of growth in that area, though. that’s why we like paypal, mastercard, fiserve, etc. the whole portfolio is up on the blog if you want my misguided choices.
i’m not touching ride sharing companies with a 10 foot pole. what’s the barrier to entry in someone giving you a ride or delivering a sandwich? good luck with the investments.
That’s a great point about the inverters. I don’t know which companies have the best technology in the sector, so I cast a wide net.
I like the cashless society play. I only wonder where the growth is going to come from, because I consider the US to be mostly cashless already. Maybe I’m only looking at my own habits which may not be representative of the nation.
I expected to dollar cost average into the ride sharing companies as they went down and then got acquired. I ended up buying at the low (at least for now) and am up 20% on each on them. I don’t think it’s a big barrier to entry, but having people already using your service/app is big. There’s not a big barrier to entry to create a search engine, but everyone seems to stick with what they know (Google).