Summary: defying the market - stephen leeb and donna leeb

This work offers a summary of the book "DEFYING THE MARKET: Profiting In The Turbulent Post-Technology Market Boom by Stephen Leeb and Donna Leeb."

The most significant trend in technology today is a slowdown in the pace of progress. In other words, the new generation of widely used products coming out today are not presenting leaps in performance substantial enough to present a compelling case for existing users to upgrade. In fact, many of the latest products and services (like cellular phones and the Internet) are not so much new discoveries as enhancements of existing technology.

The slowdown in technological progress, combined with the political imperative for national economies to grow, the industrialization of the emerging countries and the diminishing levels of Earth's natural resources means that inflation will once again become a major factor in the global economy. And in an inflationary financial environment, any investment strategy that has produced notable gains over the past 10 years will be entirely unsuitable.
In short, an investment strategy for the next 10- to 15-years should be positioned so as to benefit from the effects of inflation. That means an investment portfolio should have four key elements:

1. Stocks and financial securities that will increase in value should policymakers slip up and deflationary conditions eventuate.
2. Consumer franchises -- stocks that have such wide name recognition they can add value in any conditions.
3. Stocks that are leveraged to grow quickly should inflationary economic conditions exist.
4. Stocks that are environmentally based -- that will add value should environmental disasters occur.

Most investors assume technology will always have the answer for anything that comes along, and that the stream of new technical innovations will stretch seamlessly into the future. Historically, however, the most successful investors have never been crowd followers -- they have always tended to think for themselves, and to notice signs of change that other people overlook. For these investors, the concept of a post-technology inflationary economic environment doesn't mean the end of the world -- just another opportunity to generate wealth using a different approach.