What career do you think is the next big money maker?

Entrepreneur is a solid option - or politician, leveraging your authority afterwards to pull a massive scam while raking in hundreds of millions from it.

i think entrepreneurship always has been and always will be the top money maker. but obv a lot easier said than done

Short just reminded me off of another one - foresee financial crisis and profit from them LOL.

Engineers in the energy industry.

UI design engineers, if you live in Silicon Valley.

I think you need to position yourself in where you beleive the world is going to be 5, 10, 20 and 50 years from now.

I personally think a number of things will drive this country out of this depression we're in:

1) America's post-industrial cities (i.e. Detriot) have been completely and utterly abandoned over the past 20 years. I think its cities like this that will be the first to come back once we have a more stable regulatory and tax structure in this country (which is coming). You can now rent an old factory for pennies on the dollar while factories in China and Brazil are trading at 4-5x book. With our dollar as deflated as it is, there will come a time when people say, wtf are we doing in china and brazil when we could be doing this in our own back yard?

2) Natural gas in shale plays accross the country will fuel new industries/ manufacturing towns while providing the transportation industries with a more reliable, stable, and most importantly, domestic fuel source.

3) We have tons of farms all over this country - you could be like Jim Rogers and do that if you want.

4) The massive deleveraging occuring on all levels of our economy while countries like China and Brazil are getting close to overheating (or already have) means that we will have consumers in a few years from now who will have less debt than consumers in other countries, meaning we'll be better off. We'll be close to healing while the rest of the world is getting burned.

I could go on but I don't want to rant. Anyways, just take a look at our industries. Many of the industries that made this country great over the past 200 or 100 years are severely undervalued. You all know its best to BUY LOW and SELL HIGH. Well, I think some of our industries are at that all time low, and we have the drivers (some of which are listed above) to lead us out of this mess.

Hence why I'm trying to get into an oil and gas group at an I-bank. My current firm doesn't have an oil and gas team. I'm also thinking about A&D.

Best of luck my friend.

While obviously this seems silly... the general theory is intact.

As another thought reading Brovechkin's post...

Read about this one entrepreneur in Rwanda who got (relatively) rich there by manufacturing and selling toilet paper locally... his thought was that civil war or not, Hutu or Tutsi, people still take a shit. He figured out a way to make it more cheaply than importing.

Pharmacogenetics.

what do you guys think energy and commodities trading long term prospects?

The GINI coefficient in this country is at a historical peak. It's highly unlikely that there will be other high-paying jobs.

In another thread that OP and I were both in, I said that the next 40 years are probably going to be a lot tougher for rich people-particularly traders- than the last 40, and that folks should focus on doing what they enjoy and learn to be content with what they have. I find it interesting that he's looking for the next big profession rather than finding something he'll enjoy.

Taxes are probably going back up to 50-60% on the rich when we're done. In the face of all of this, if OP wants to be a Jesuit priest, that decision probably won't be as expensive over the next 40 years as it would have been over the past 40.

I'm not looking for the next big profession... well, I'm not trying to join it... I'm just wondering because it seems like there are cycles in regards to pay for some professions and I'm wondering if anybody sees any up and coming careers about to takeover as the "traders and bankers"

That's really never happened. What's really happened is that there's a 70 year cycle in banking. It wasn't so much that doctors, lawyers, and C-level execs exceeded trader and banker pay in the 50s, it was that bankers and traders sank below them in terms of pay.

2006-2007 banking and trading are probably going to stand as the record pay per person relative to average income for the working rich for the next 50 years. It's highly unlikely any of us will do better than that during our working careers. And that's ok.

Ah... so do you think doctors, lawyers, and c-level execs will be the top earners (along with some entrepreneurs) until something very drastic happens/the end?

No. But doctors and lawyers and execs see more stable earnings than bankers and certainly traders during the multi-decade dry spell the rich are about to enter into. Everyone in the top 2% will be earning less, but the doctors and bankers will suffer less than the traders and when you factor in the stability of their earnings, may even earn more for a few decades.

Stop worrying about money. Things are going to stop getting worse for the middle class over the next few years, and then it's going to get a lot harder to be rich. You should be more worried about spending time with your family and less worried about models and bottles. If you know your family is ok, nothing else really matters, does it?

You keep thinking that I'm trying to base my life off of these discussions... I'm just interested in it. No way I'm gonna be a doctor or a lawyer. I'd rather be doing interesting physics research (if I was smart enough) for 60k than be a dr. or lawyer. I'm just keeping this conversation going for conversation's sake.

Yea, my post above may have taken this forum post down the wrong road.

Sales and trading, i-banking, and the rest of it will come back. Just because we're in a depression, doesn't mean the jobs will go away forever. The best firms/ best people thrive in down times. Sure they'll trim down for now, but they'll be back.

Just saw this and thought of this thread:

“The sexy job in the next ten years will be… the ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it – that’s going to be a hugely important skill.”

• Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google