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Mark Hulbert
April 29, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EDT
By Mark Hulbert, MarketWatch
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) "” Pencils ready?
Here is today's investment pop quiz:
True or false: By the end of this decade, the percentage of U.S. population who are less than 15 years old will be higher than in China.
The correct answer, believe it or not, is "True."
Don't be too hard on yourself if you answered this wrong, since almost everyone does so as well. For years now, there has been a drumbeat from economists about the increasing proportion of the U.S. population that is in or approaching retirement.
And that is indeed a powerful demographic trend. But the increasing proportion of the population in the below-15 cohort is a powerful trend as well, and it will have dramatic effects on the long-term health of the U.S. economy. And unlike the trend towards an increasing number of elderly citizens "” which is well known "” most investors are completely unaware of this other one.
Believe it or not, according to Ned Davis Research, on whose analysis I base these comments, the U.S. in 2020 will not only have a greater percentage in the below-15 cohort than China, but also relative to every European country (except Ireland) and most Asian countries as well.
If both the below-15 and over-65 cohorts are growing as a percentage of the overall population in the U.S., that means that the cohorts in the middle will be shrinking. And that indeed is true, according to Pat Tschosik, consumer strategist at Ned Davis Research, and Steve Sellers, a research analyst at the firm.
The investment implications of these trends are enormous, according to these researchers, since the typical individual's peak earning power, as well as expenditures, occur within these shrinking cohorts. Among those companies that will be most adversely affected are retailers that depend on the U.S. luxury market "” such as Nordstrom /quotes/comstock/13*!jwn/quotes/nls/jwn JWN -0.44% and Coach /quotes/comstock/13*!coh/quotes/nls/coh COH +3.80% .
Among the companies that Ned Davis Research is projecting will benefit the most from these demographic trends: Urban Outfitters /quotes/comstock/15*!urbn/quotes/nls/urbn URBN -3.84% , Gamestop /quotes/comstock/13*!gme/quotes/nls/gme GME -0.08% , and Children's Place /quotes/comstock/15*!plce/quotes/nls/plce PLCE -3.28% .
A legitimate comeback to this analysis from Ned Davis Research is that the markets presumably have already discounted these demographic trends "” and therefore it's too late to make investment decisions because of them. But a fascinating academic study suggests otherwise.
Entitled "Attention, Demographics, and the Stock Market," the study found that the market systematically does not take into account the consequences of demographic trends that are more than five years into the future "” even when those consequences are quite predictable. (The study's authors are Stefano DellaVigna, an associate professor of economics at University of California at Berkeley, and Joshua M. Pollet, an associate professor of finance at Michigan State University. Click here for a copy of the study .)
Another of the professors' findings shows just how much is at stake: On average historically, they found, whenever demographic trends predicted a one-percentage-point increase in demand for an industry's goods or services, its profits that year were 5% to 10% higher.
So even though 2020 seems like an awfully long way off, the rewards will be great for those who begin now to anticipate what the world will look like then.
Mark Hulbert is the founder of Hulbert Financial Digest in Annandale, Va. He has been tracking the advice of more than 160 financial newsletters since 1980.
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Mark Hulbert is editor of the Hulbert Financial Digest, which since 1980 has been tracking the performance of hundreds of investment advisors. The HFD became a service of MarketWatch in April 2002. In addition to being a Senior Columnist for MarketWatch, Hulbert writes a monthly column for Barron's.com and a column on investment strategies for the Journal of the American Association of Individual Investors. A frequent guest on television and radio shows, you may have seen Hulbert on CNBC, Wall Street Week, or ABC's World News This Morning. Most recently, Dow Jones and MarketWatch launched a new weekly newsletter based on Hulbert's research, entitled Hulbert on Markets: What's Working Now.
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