Be it the railroad or the Internet: if something radically new is created, it is a good breeding ground for prosperity. With the right investment, you don't have to be Bill Gates to benefit from it.
Once upon a time, cars were only for the wealthy. Until Henry Ford came along and, thanks to assembly line production, made them affordable for average earners. To go shopping you used to have to leave the house or leaf through catalogs. Until the computer scientist Jeff Bezos sent the first books via his online platform Amazon in 1995. The PC was little more than an advanced electric typewriter plus screen. Until Bill Gates gave him previously unimagined possibilities with his MS-DOS operating system.
New technologies open new business models
Ford, Bezos and Gates have two things in common: They used new technological possibilities and systems for their business model. And they got wealthy with it. Very wealthy, in fact. "The wealthiest people did not make their fortune by immersing themselves in the mainstream, but by recognizing and developing a new opportunity, a new technology, a new market unnoticed by their contemporaries." This is how the author Detlef Gürtler describes in his Book "The Dagoberts - A World History of Wealth" the history of the origins of great wealth.
But it also becomes clear that in order to get wealthy, you must do something, the bis capital won't come by itself. 95 percent of the wealthiest people in the world are entrepreneurs, researched Rainer Zitelmann for his book "Become and Stay Wealthy". His conclusion: "Entrepreneurship is necessary to become extremely wealthy."
Fortunes also take off by rail
In fact, technological leaps in history have always opened up favorable time windows to get wealthy. The prime example of this is the railroad era. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Krupp - these are just three prominent names who laid the rails for their enormous fortunes during this period. The railway era in the middle of the 19th century was a “steel railway” era. Rails and wagons were initially made of iron, but this material turned out to be not hard enough for continuous operation. The rails and wheels of the locomotives broke so often that the operators looked for a harder material: steel - supplied in Europe by Krupp, in America by Andrew Carnegie.
A real "circle of angels"
“Nothing was more conducive to the creation of great wealth than the railroad,” summarizes Gürtler, “it multiplied the potential sales market for most of the industrial products as well as the maximum achievable size of a production facility ... All the new products and raw materials were transported by rail which let the rail network expand further. Heavy industry was simply inconceivable without the enormously cheaper and simplified transport offered by the railroad. And the railroad, in turn, was one of the most important customers for their products. ”For Gürtler, this symbiosis was“ an angelic circle of industrialization
”Internet as a railway of the 21st century?
Internet, quantum computers, software – we may be in a “railway era” again. A strong indication of this: With Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Larry Page (Google), five of the ten wealthiest people in the world have just made their fortunes in the Internet and software age.
Benefiting from the future as an investor
You don't have to start your own business to benefit from it – dynamic asset advice and targeted asset management could also help. "Of course, we can align portfolios in such a way that they can benefit above average from current technology trends," emphasizes Heinz Bednar, Managing Director Of Erste Asset Management.
With the ESPA STOCK TECHNO equity fund, for example, you can directly benefit from the development of companies active in information technology. The biggest positions in this equity fund are currently Microsoft, Google's parent Alphabet, Apple, Facebook and Visa. Profits from the past, of course, do not guarantee future development.
Equity funds take advantage of current trends
If you want to focus on future technologies, the ESPA STOCK BIOTEC equity fund is also an offer. It invests in the most important biotechnology companies, primarily in the USA. The largest positions are currently Celgene, Gilead and Vertex.
Packing happiness
Moreover, what John D. Rockefeller, a kind of role model of all the truly wealthy, said in summary about success and wealth is true: to get wealthy, you have to have three things above all: luck, luck, and luck again. However, one must also understand how to take advantage of luck. A consultation with Erste Bank and Sparkassen on asset building and private asset management could be a sinful step in this direction.
Please note that an investment in securities entails risks in addition to the opportunities described. The performance of the past does not allow reliable conclusions to be drawn about future developments.
"The wealthiest people did not make their fortune by entering the mainstream, but by recognizing and unlocking a new opportunity, a new technology, a new market, unnoticed by their contemporaries."
Detlef Gürtler, author of the book "The Dagoberts : A World History of Wealth"