Three things I would invest in with caveats.
1. Water. Fundamentally, I started looking at investments in water about 15 years ago. Fresh, clean water cannot be taken for granted. And it is not — water is political, and litigious. Look at Standing Rock, or what is going on at Spirit Lake.Transporting water is impractical for both political and physical reasons, so buying up water rights did not make a lot of sense to me, unless I was pursuing a greater fool theory of investment — which was not my intention. What became clear to me is that food is the way to invest in water. That is, grow food in water-rich areas and transport it for sale in water-poor areas. This is the method for redistributing water that is least contentious, and ultimately it can be profitable, which will ensure that this redistribution is sustainable. A bottle of wine takes over 400 bottles of water to produce — the water embedded in food is what I found interesting. -Michael Burry.
2. Nitrogen: the Koch brothers have amazing holdings that affect our food supplies. They call it “nurturing nutrients”. Recently flying on a plane with some folks, the cat next to me worked for Koch, and had bad vison so he decided to look at his whole slide deck at 150% which allowed me to easily read it. It was scary. Let’s get down to it. The Koch brothers don’t want to grow food, they want to control how it is grown and distribution. There was whole entire slides dedicated to how they were going to do this. By controlling Nitrogen, they would have a future stock in the way big ag played out. We happen to be an agriculturally rich country, a water rich country, we are also a Nitrogen rich county which is essential for growing food. The most chilling part was when the slide deck said “room for growth” and pointed to a pie chart in which 20% of the American market was owned by private farmers, they had a whole plane to take this.
3. American Soccer: there is a hard sell here, but it is obvious, soccer is taking off in America. It started in 1994, and hasn’t stopped, but it is most notable today July 29th 2017, with all these kids in elementary school walking around with Messi and Ronaldo jerseys. Today I watch Tottenham vs Man City and the El Clasico between Real Madrid and Barcelona played in the untied states to sold out stadiums… this was followed by an MLS soccer game between LA and Seattle, the first 20mins of the sounders match your couldn’t see the players because of all the fireworks and smoke bombs they lit off. MLS is expanding rapidly at a debit, but they wouldn’t to that if they didn’t think it was a foundation for a pay off.
4. Caveats
a. Now going back to water, we happen to be in the luckiest place ever when it comes to “Guns Germs Steel” North America, no continent has water like we have water. The great lakes are 21% of the worlds supply of fresh water, if you don’t think there are cats out there making moves for this, well you are dumb. My imagry of this is the future is that this is sold and we have to buy into it.
b. Nitrogen: this one might be gone. It seems like big ag already figured this out and are buying up all the resources, we will probably have a movie about it in ten years with some Matt Damon dude.
c. Soccer: this is mostly controlled by European holdings but increasingly being held by American holdings. ESPN seems to be the biggest profiteer. Here is how you make money. The folks that went to gold mines never made money, the folks that were apart of gold rush never made much money, it was the people along the way that sold them the things that made all the money. A skillet in 1890 for $10, you make money off of the peripheral. All the kids that want to buy a supporter scarf, a soccer ball, a tee shirt… the next problem with soccer/football in America is that nobody solved the fucking 90mins game problem. It will be very hard and increasingly hard for our kids to sit through 90mins of soccer. NFL, MLB and NBA have all figured this out… commercials. Soccer has and undisrupted flow, they can not break it up, it is fluid, the closest we have come to this is international friendlies where the play in hot places and have “hydration breaks” to me it doesn’t seem to break the game up too much… they will definitely have to build up some you tube presence, every one is fighting for seconds and fractions of attention. More you tube, more facebook, more goals and plays, more ESPN… secondly how do you break it up… Hydration breaks.
|