"It is hard to dream up a higher quality investment idea, and the autonomies now offer perhaps the best opp, to last even beyond our grandchildren's lifetimes, though the Baby Autonomies in sound consumer industries will be where the fur will really fly.

"You are right that the Nifty Fifty, though sometimes compared, was a different idea....largely domestic (but increasingly internationalizing) titans benefiting from the move from post war austerity to the Military Industrial Complex cold war world....the emerging middle class of a few developed and recovering nations, not half the world and all of the post-Communist world blinking in the new sunlight...Unilever and the like were actually rather badly managed colonial corpocracies, so was Shell, but modern management has got the message now...Nestle has approximately two dozen billion dollar brands…in India they have only launched 5 of them...product managers just waiting for GDP per cap to hit the required level for success! No R&D, no debt (on the contrary), no new management philosophy or speculative marketing budgets...Unilever has a dozen billion dollar brands and in Indonesia it has only launched 3. By contrast, Shell and Big Oil's equivalent is yet another billion dollar oil resource (!)...not impossible but much harder than selling Pampers in yet another country...deserves a lower PER

"As they say, The Best Is Still To Come"

David Fuller's view Many thanks for this informative and farsighted email. I do think the Autonomies are the biggest corporate story of my lifetime and beyond. The companies themselves have been around for a long time but initially they operated mainly in their native countries, then the OECD and now the world, thanks to globalisation and the rising middle classes in growth economies. You make a very good point about PERs and the comparative ease of selling successful brands to consumers in another country, relative to the risks and costs of finding and developing an additional oil or gas field.

Autonomies catering to household consumers worldwide lead the pack. The case for them is so obvious that one needs to ask: what can go wrong? The usual risks still apply - management errors, competition, plus political and financial problems regarding regional ownership and taxation. These are acceptable risks when considering the potential for leveraging up sales for successful brands in the global economy.

Investors in Autonomies also face familiar manageable risks in my opinion - overvaluation, bear markets and recessions. The simplest and perhaps most effective way to manage these risks is by monitoring performance on price charts which also show an approximation of the medium-term trend mean represented by the 200-day moving average. At the extremes, we know that uncharacteristically large accelerations above a rising trend mean are unsustainable, often climactic and usually followed by reversion to at least the MA. Conversely, in bear markets we know that sharp accelerations below a declining trend mean are also unsustainable, often climactic and usually followed by reversion to at least the MA.

Check this out for yourself by looking at 5-year price data or preferably longer, in which case I would use semi-log scales, to reveal buying and selling opportunities relative to the MA over the last market cycle or two. Similarly, keep an eye on valuations. Historically, the most fundamentally fashionable momentum stocks experience PER expansion…until the next bear market takes them back to and usually below their PER mean, even though the companies may still be recording great earnings.