I don’t like it, but what else do you see happening?

I believe there is a fairly reasonable chance that the future business and political landscape will be dominated by ultra-large, global, but vitally structurally important corporations. Science fiction writers have predicted this outcome and call these entities megacorps. Whilst they probably won’t become as powerful (or magical) as those in Shadowrun, they will be gigantic relative to the biggest corporations today, and may possess some of the following properties:

• Stronger influence on local laws and international treaties. In some cases, carve-outs or exemptions that give special rights to specific organisations.
• Far bigger proportions of global productivity.
• Far more extreme discrepancies in pay and wealth between the CEO and entry-level employees.
• Far more diversification, functionally and geographically.
• etc.

More importantly, a key trait of some of these megacorps will be that they become overwhelmingly important to the ‘normal everyday functioning’ of governments and large corporations and smaller businesses. Should one of these companies magically disappear overnight, you might find your workplace unable to function. In worse cases, critical infrastructure would fail, leaving significant amounts of people without power, food, water, etc.

It is hard to predict the future, but I would also anticipate there will be other huge, but far less critical megacorps. Some of these may provide entertaintment to the masses and luxuries to the elite who are going to become even more astoundingly wealthy, and also growing in number from largely untapped emerging markets.

If we assume that a future dominated by megacorps is probable, it makes sense to invest in companies that either best fit the bill now, or are the companies who are likely to make that future happen.

My portfolio

As of 2022-01-30, my equity portfolio consists of

I’ve never fancied myself as a stock picker, so broad index ETF’s will likely always represent a significant proportion of my portfolio (however, I expect that even they become more concentrated with the types of companies I am talking about). It would be absolutely futile to think about price targets over the horizon I believe relevant here, but in addition to the AMZN/MSFT/GOOG positions, I will be adding more individual names that I consider likely to thrive over the next few decades in accordance to the ideas expressed above.

Outside of tech, some industries that I would first investigate for potential future megacorp status would include, agri, biotech, and luxury.