DEMOGRAPHIC TAILWINDS · Markets, Policy & Trends
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Demographic
Tailwinds

Ride the upside. Shelter from storms. Understand what is coming, and how to prepare.

What can you do to ensure tailwinds for your family, home, business, health, and government? Follow the stories. Explore the trends.

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Pampas grass bending in the wind against a deep blue sky
Papers

Recent demographic papers

German Headwinds & Tailwinds
Japan: Year of the Fire Horse & Equity Multiples
Singapore: Fountain of Youth or Chronic Disease Central?
China: One Last Kick at the Can
Europe's Demographic Future: Clues from Greco-Roman Fecundity
Taiwan: Make Qigong, Not War
The Ratio of Revolution
AI: The Cognitive Cost of Longevity
Headwinds

Demand disappears in a headwind

The sentiment immediately preceding a demographic headwind is excitement, energy, hope, leverage, expansion, contagion, riches and dreams. The environment is intoxicating. It lures you in. You will be tempted to extrapolate.

But after a tailwind has ended and a short calm has passed, you will face a gale-force headwind. Fewer people will want to buy your house, university degree, motorcycle, air fryer, hip replacement, luxury bag, golf membership, ETF, startup, tax advice, government debt, war, revolution, or tasting menu.

Advance warning of a demographic headwind allows you to seek refuge in a protected harbour until the storm has passed.

Identify and sidestep imminent headwinds.

A dark storm front rolling in over trees at sunset
An empty golf fairway in autumn
2010

Golf

We warned that the US golfing demographic faced a severe headwind until 2023.

Two thousand 18-hole golf courses closed over the next decade.

Rows of unfinished houses in China
2011

Housing

While delivering a keynote for a French bank's China Conference in Qingdao, I warned that Chinese real estate faced a headwind for 15 years. Sixty million people would drop out of the home-buying demographic over the next 15 years.

China has 70 to 90 million unsold homes and apartments.

A Japanese wartime savings bond certificate
2012

Bonds

We forewarned that the Japanese population would stop buying Japanese Government Bonds, and that they would in fact become net sellers, for at least a decade.

The public spent the next decade selling trillions of yen of JGBs to the Bank of Japan, which at one point owned more than half of all outstanding JGBs.

Tailwinds

Tailwinds are awesome

A rising population, from a baby boom, an echo boom, an immigration wave, an expanding middle class, or even a tsunami of oldies, can all provide business tailwinds that produce soaring revenues and make you think you are a genius.

Every business sector and country has multiple tailwinds rippling through at any time. We have the tools to measure tailwind speed, direction, duration and who it benefits. Do not blow these opportunities. Let us help you position your business, your family, or your immigration secretary in front of a tailwind.

A stunt biplane climbing
Diagram of a hip replacement implant
2011

Hippies

We said that the hippies of the sixties would need replacement parts for the next 20 years. Hips, knees, teeth, lenses for cataracts, pacemakers and stents.

Most procedures doubled in volume.

Horses in a field at sunset
2011

Japanese equities

During a keynote to the board of a large global investment house in Tokyo, we said that the Nikkei price to sales ratio could rise fourfold. It did.

The call was based on an echo baby boom in the late 1960s to early 1970s, triggered by the Year of the Fire Horse.

About

Markets, mobs, and maths

For decades I ran a quantitative hedge fund that profited from the madness of crowds, turning patterns of memory and emotion into investment strategies.

In 2008, while helping a European company understand their future business demand in Japan, I inadvertently stumbled on the predictive power of demographics. The company went on to buy 60 hospitals and clinics in Europe.

Using the same quant discipline as in the fund, I studied how population trends shape economies, societies and governments.

In 2010 I put the hedge fund model on ice and dove into demographic research, predicting stock markets in Japan and Iran, real estate in India and Brazil, inflation in China and Europe, baby boomer joint replacements, migration flows, revolutions, golf memberships and GDP growth. My clients were investment banks, insurers, corporations and governments.

In 2015 I relaunched the quant behavioural-macro model for a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, and helped a bunch of wealthy people retire better. Not proud.

93% came true

A better hit rate than the quant model. By far.

Demographic analysis helps people, companies and governments anticipate change. It can help a company work out when to expand and when to pull the plug, and also where. Governments can better anticipate when to increase spending and when to rein it in, and in what sectors.

Where do you want to work, raise a family, or retire? Demographics can help you figure it out. When is a benevolent authoritarian best for a population, and when should the people decide? That is a demographic question.

The market background, the quant rigour, and running a large P&L for decades keep the analysis disciplined and honest.

David G. Munro
DAVID G. MUNRO uncovers demographic trends that move financial markets, inform government policy, underpin real estate and healthcare, suggest business opportunities, and identify when a country is ripe for revolution.
Contact

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Advisory work, research commissions, keynotes and workshops on demographic change and what it does to an industry, a market or a country.

Based in
Singapore