As the Pandemic Exposes the Wealth Gap... Grab the Wealth 
Eric Fry | The Great Plague of Athens, in 430 BC, was devastating. It killed up to 25% of the Greek city-state’s population – more than 100,000 people. Plus, it was largely responsible for the unravelling of Ancient Greek society and Athenian democracy. On the other hand, the Black Death – the bubonic plague that hit Europe in the 14th century – led to the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Renaissance. The 1918 Spanish flu and World War I wrought death and devastation around the globe, but it led directly into the Roaring Twenties – a decade of economic prosperity in the United States. Here’s the Stock Symbol of Eric Fry’s Next 1,000% Winner Then, following World War II, the United States became the greatest of great powers. A long period of economic expansion followed, lifting the middle class to heights never seen before. Clearly, pandemics, wars, and depressions cause great social changes. And just as clearly, you cannot predict whether those changes will be for good or ill. So we don’t know yet what will follow the COVID-19 pandemic. A re-flowering of democracy and robust economic expansion? Or prolonged recessions and renewed clashes with China? No one knows yet. But we can make some preparations for whatever comes… America's "Preexisting Condition" Crises like COVID-19 shine a light on a society’s current problems. More than anything, the coronavirus has exposed for all to see the huge and growing wealth gap between the very rich and everyone else. But even before the pandemic, we were already in the midst of one of the widest wealth gaps on record. Forty years ago, in 1980, the richest 1% of Americans owned about 30% of all household wealth in the country… and the bottom 90% owned about 24% of all household wealth. But by 2012, the share of all household financial wealth owned by the top 1% had skyrocketed to more than 60%… and the share owned by the bottom 90% had plummeted below 10%. 
When you compare the average net worth of America’s lower class, working class, and middle class to the net worth of the top 10%, it’s like comparing a tiny office building to the Empire State Building. 
That’s where we were before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. Since then, 45 million middle-, working-, and lower-class Americans have filed for unemployment, putting jobless rates at their highest levels since the Great Depression. But at the exact same time that was happening, between March 18 and June 17, the combined wealth of America’s 600 or so billionaires soared by $584 billion, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. That’s the wealth gap. More recently, another 1.5 million Americans just filed for unemployment, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The “temporary” damage caused by the pandemic is rapidly becoming permanent. As of July 10, Yelp Inc. (YELP) had listed 132,580 closures on its crowd-sourced business review website. According to the company’s July 23 Economic Average Report, 55% of those closures – more than 72,000 businesses, most likely mom-and-pops – are now considered permanent. So it’s apparent that this divide between the very rich and everyone else will grow in the coming years. But like I showed you before, this wealth gap was already here. As Chuck Collins, the coauthor of the Institute for Policy Studies study, recently said, as the U.S. entered the pandemic, “in some ways the extreme inequality was the preexisting condition.” To get rid of this condition, we should take a cue from America’s billionaires… Act Like a Billionaire Of course, that $584 billion owned by the country’s billionaires isn’t cash – it’s not literally lining their pockets. It’s mostly stock market wealth. Since the S&P 500 Index bottomed out in mid-March, it’s climbed fairly steadily back and is approaching its all-time highs. But you can’t just dump your money in an index fund and expect to join Jeff Bezos at Davos a few years later. You see, this wealth gap is not just between the very rich and everyone else. It’s also between the world’s top tech companies and future top tech companies… and everyone else. That’s why I call it the “Technochasm.” In early 2013, the FANG stocks – Facebook Inc. (FB), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Netflix Inc. (NFLX), and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) – accounted for a little more than 3% of the S&P 500’s market capitalization. Since then, the value of these stocks has grown so much that they now account for about 12% of the index’s market cap. 3 Ways to Play the 50X Gold Bull Expanding the acronym to FAANGM by adding in Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) boosts the grouping’s share of S&P 500 market cap from 12% to a whopping 25%. 
Or consider electric vehicle and battery maker Tesla Inc. (TSLA) over the past seven years – it’s up an astounding 1,200%. Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. (F) and General Motors Co. (GM) are showing negative returns. They’re roadkill. 
That’s a story of market dominance. No wonder these stocks in particular and technology stocks in general have been the darlings of Wall Street for years. The more these companies keep earning, the more investor money flows to them. And the richer their billionaire executives get. Once we get past the current pandemic – whether we’re heading into a new Renaissance or another Dark Age – there will be two kinds of investors. There will be investors who understand technology and exponential progress and harness its incredible power… and there will be roadkill. Don’t be roadkill. Make sure your portfolio is on the right side of the Technochasm. Sincerely, 
Eric Fry
P.S. Something remarkable happened recently while I was visiting America’s richest ZIP code. (It’s located far from Manhattan, Palm Beach and Beverly Hills.) First, someone smashed our car windows – and stole thousands of dollars’ worth of video equipment. But the good news is, while there, I found what I believe could be my next 1,000% winner. (I’ve already found 40-plus 1,000% or higher stock market winners.) And today I’m giving away the name and ticker symbol of this company for free here. | 
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