The trend is your friend. Every investor has heard it. To maximize returns in the stock market, you must be on the right side of unfolding developments. But which ones? We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Millions of businesses are either shut down or running at reduced capacity. And most consumers are still too leery to travel, dine out, shop and spend. These trends are negative. On the other hand, energy is still cheap. Inflation and interest rates are low. We have unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus. And the Federal Reserve just announced that U.S. household net wealth just reached a record $130.2 trillion. Those trends are positive. So what's an investor to do? Start by understanding that some trends - like the ones just mentioned - are short term. They can and will change quickly and without notice. But other trends are decades or centuries long. They may change, but far less often. For investors, these long-term trends are both the most rewarding and the safest to follow. Best of all, they are almost entirely positive. Yet the vast majority of investors don't recognize them. Fortunately, I have the antidote. It's a new book by my friend Ron Bailey - author of The End of Doom and Reason magazine's science correspondent - and Marian L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. It's called Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. And it is a tour de force. Bailey and Tupy's premise is one I've stated here many times before, that the world is getting objectively better in most ways for most people in most places. The authors point out in the book, for example, that over the last 200 years, the world population grew eightfold. But the world economy grew more than a hundredfold. The vast majority of our ancestors lived short lives in disease-ridden poverty and pervasive ignorance. But over the last 100 years, global poverty plummeted, as did global illiteracy. Standards of living - as well as household net worth - have never been higher. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." It didn't happen. In fact, the world population has more than doubled over the last half-century, yet today we grow more food than ever on far less land. Since 1900, average life expectancy has more than doubled, reaching more than 72 years globally and 79 years in the U.S. Between 1980 and 2017, the inflation-adjusted global hourly income per person grew by 80%. The media harps on growing authoritarian trends in places like Brazil, Hungary, Poland and even the U.S. But there are more people living in democratic or partially democratic countries than ever before. Over the last half-century, wars between countries have become rarer, and those that do occur kill fewer people. Even the chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe - earthquake, flood, storm, wildfire or landslide - has declined by nearly 99% since the 1920s and 1930s. | 
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