Why Twitter’s ‘WFH Forever’ Policy Will Amplify America’s Wealth Gap

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I’ve been working from home for decades now. More than that, I haven’t merely worked from home, but I’ve worked at home for the past 20 years or so.

work from home

Source: Shutterstock

I raised my three kids mostly on my own. So, during the early years, I felt a lot like a time-division multiple access (TDMA) cellular signal.

I’d move seamlessly from writing a small portion of a column to making breakfast to participating in a conference call. Then I’d move to breaking up a dispute between my kids to writing a bit more of a column to driving a kid to one of their sports to writing a bit more of a column, often while sitting on a bench intermittently watching that sport.

So for me, work from home has been about two decades of semi-structured chaos.

I’ve loved it … mostly. But it is definitely not a lifestyle that works well for everyone.

However, since early March, tens of millions of Americans have been forced to join me, as employers have emptied out offices in order to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Plus, schools are shuttered, too, meaning millions of folks are TFH (teaching from home) as well as WFH. I can’t imagine.

Then on Tuesday, Jack Dorsey, CEO at Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), took things a step further by telling many of his employees they’ll be able to work from home indefinitely.

Dorsey seems to be the first big company CEO to make “WFH forever” official, but he won’t be the last.

Plenty of people out there are never going back to the office.

Like I do, many former office drones love WFH. I’ve been able to take advantage of WFH perks over the years, like scheduling midday, midweek volleyball games … or taking a pen and paper down to the beach and writing. I bet many of you are doing something similar, and I know no one misses their commute.

Managers are discovering they can actually trust their employees. Great!

But here’s the thing…

When You Can’t Work From Home

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 29% of Americans can work from home.

That means 71% of Americans are now either out of a job — we hit 14.7% unemployment in April, according to the BLS — or working in coronavirus-prone warehouses, grocery stores and plants.

Moreover, unemployment is hitting some populations harder than others. If you can’t work from home in a lot of cases, you get let go.

While high school graduates saw unemployment reach 17.3% in April, college grads experienced just 8.4% unemployment.

This is why I’ve been saying the coronavirus has supercharged the wealth gap. And now we can see that WFH technology like Slack (NYSE:WORK), Zoom Video (NASDAQ:ZM) and cloud computing is accelerating it even further.

While more than half of information technology workers can work from home, according to BLS, only one in 20 service workers can.

Unemployment in finance (average salary: $73,000) was at 5.4% in April, while leisure and hospitality workers (average salary: $23,000) faced 39.3% unemployment.

The Rich Get Richer

These kinds of trends aren’t going to end once the Covid-19 crisis passes.

Silicon Valley is going to keep “disrupting” the status quo … and it’s going to keep destroying established businesses and entire industries by creating game-changing new technologies.

And the wealth gap will keep on widening.

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.

Source: Chart by InvestorPlace

There’s nothing we can do to stop this.

But we can put ourselves and our portfolios on the right side of this “Technochasm” by hitching our portfolios to the rapidly emerging WFH megatrend.

Here’s how.

From Pastime to Megatrend

One year ago, I pinpointed a trend I believed would fuel a powerful, long-term investment opportunity. I called it the “screen-time megatrend”… but you could now call it the “shelter in place” or “WFH” megatrend.

Whatever you call it, we’re talking about a societal migration from face time to screen time that will create powerful moneymaking opportunities for decades to come.

This phenomenon was becoming the “new normal” even before the coronavirus burst onto the scene. But thanks to shutdowns and shelter-in-place practices around the world, the screen-time megatrend caught a powerful tailwind.

Source: Chart by InvestorPlace

Because of the virus, billions of folks were forced to shift some portion of their lifestyle from face-to-face interaction to face-to-screen modes.

The coronavirus epidemic and the screen-time phenomenon have combined to create a multitrillion-dollar disruption to the economy — and the best opportunities are just getting underway.

Video Games Benefit From the Screen-Time Trend

The video game industry is one main beneficiary of this trend.

Every facet of the gaming world is growing rapidly, and Covid-19 will not slow that growth rate. According to Newzoo’s “Global Games Market Report,” 2.5 billion gamers across the globe spent about $150 billion on games in 2019.

Source: Chart by InvestorPlace

Last month, I showed you that Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI) is one of the best ways to profit. It publishes many popular games, including Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush.

The stock is up 66% over the last 12 months — and 10.7% since I showed it to you on April 25 — but still has a ways to go to reach the all-time highs it hit back in September 2018. CEO Bobby Kotick recently said the company expects to go from 350 million users currently to 1 billion within five years, so it should get back there quickly.

Also last month I showed you Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

Nvidia started in the 1990s as a computer gaming-focused company, making specialized chips that could convert PCs into de facto advanced gaming consoles. Today, though, all roads lead to Nvidia. Thanks to the company’s dominance of the GPU market, it is at the center of several powerful screen-time growth waves, including gaming, data centers, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

It’s up 17.5% since I showed it to you on April 11, compared to just 2.8% growth in the S&P 500.

Of course, Activision and Nvidia are just two tech stocks that I think have huge profit potential over the next few years.

In fact, I’ve identified the one company that I believe will benefit most from these trends.

In my brand-new presentation, I’ll tell you about it. Check it out here.

Regards,

Eric Fry

P.S. If you pay attention to the news, you might think the coronavirus and the horse race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the only big stories out there. However, the media is totally missing what is by far a bigger election year story.

You see, an alarming new trend taking shape in America is making a lot of people really wealthy … and at the same time making others poorer. I believe this will be the No. 1 factor affecting your money over the next few years. If you haven’t seen this or heard about what’s happening in your hometown, I strongly encourage you to learn what’s going on. I can show you exactly what’s happening.

Eric Fry is an award-winning stock picker with numerous “10-bagger” calls — in good markets AND bad. How? By finding potent global megatrends … before they take off. And when it comes to bear markets, you’ll want to have his “blueprint” in hand before stocks go south. Eric does not own the aforementioned securities.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2020/05/twitter-work-from-home-policy-coronavirus-wealth-gap/.

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