FORTUNE: There was a major acceleration of
technological adoption in so many indus-
tries during the pandemic. Will that momen-
tum continue?MALLUN YEN: The digitization of work was
always inevitable. What we’ve seen with the
pandemic is that what might have taken
decades to roll out, it’s forced widespread
adoption immediately.
We’re also seeing a new generation of
founders who came from, for instance, the
Googles and the LinkedIns and the Twitters
and the Salesforces of the world, who then
go on to these companies that were trying
to disrupt those old-school industries—and
who now are going beyond that with their
own startups. Let me give you an example,
which is a company in insurance tech called
AgentSync. They do something very boring,
which is licensing of insurance agents. But
the founders came from LinkedIn, and then
went on to Zenefits, in the case of the CEO,
and the CTO went to Dropbox and Stripe.
They saw a problem with respect to licensing
compliance when they were at Zenefits, which
is what AgentSync is focused on. And while
they are not people who’ve been in insurance
all of their lives—they bring with them thegrowth, it’s stocks that can go up long term
versus stocks that only go up in fits and starts.SAVITA SUBRAMANIAN: The idea that we’ll
see sectors rather than regions is interest-
ing, but I don’t know if now is the time. For
multinationals, what’s happening is they’re
forming little ecosystems. And there are
big divides between countries today from a
values and governance framework. The U.S.
and Europe may have a more similar value
structure, whereas China’s framework, politi-
cal backdrop, and governance structure is
very dissimilar. Another issue that we need
to think about is just the role of China in U.S.
companies’ manufacturing.EISWERT: One of the things that helped
U.S. markets get through COVID is that the
United States has a global reserve currency
and a printing press. So you’ve got great op-
portunities, still, to buy franchise companies
in emerging markets, where the currency got
destroyed. There’s a great story of growth in
Indian banks. You could have bought HDFC
Bank a few months ago for one-and-a-half
times book value, which is an amazing valu-
ation for a company that grows its earnings
10% a year.Mastercard
(MA, $335)PayPal
(PYPL, $192)Rocket
Companies
(RKT, $23)Lemonade
(LMND, $65)Root
(ROOT, $ 20 )HDFC Bank
(HDB, $ 69 )UniCredit
(MI : UCG, $ 10 )PICKS
FROM
THE
EXPERTS*J osh Brown- R itholtz Wealth Management
Sarah Ketterer- Causeway Capital
*STOCKS APPEAR IN THE ORDER MENTIONED. PRICES AS OF 11/16/20.KETTERER: ROBYN TWOMEY—REDUX PICTURES