The financial-services explosion. We can invest in those themes, too. If the experts are right, we're all going to be shopping, investing, heck, living , online. If you dig deeper, you'll find that all sorts of companies, ranging from retailers such as Walgreen WAG to discount brokers like Charles Schwab SCH , have profited from the Web. So too have their shareholders.
Mutual funds have plot lines, as well.
Here, the stories are managers' strategies, or how they select securities. Often, these philosophies are colored by history. One of my favorite fund families, Tweedy, Browne, has a beautifully rich history. Bill Tweedy hung out his shingle in 1920 as a broker specializing in unrecognized, rarely traded stocks. Eventually, Tweedy bought and sold stocks for legendary value investor and author Benjamin Graham .