William sterling has been a big-picture guy on Wall Street for 18 years. Ask the man, a self-described “recovering economist,” about the case for international investing, and he will bend your ear with a barrage of opinions on everything from America’s external accounts to Japanese real estate prices. So how does Sterling, 50, who oversees $5.2 billion as chief investment officer of New York’s Trilogy Advisors, zoom in on a list of stocks? Demographics play a key role.

Demographic information comes with a comforting level of certainty, no matter what the market. If you know the number of 15-year-olds alive today, it’s not too hard to guess how many 25-year-olds will be around a decade hence. “There’s almost nothing else you can say about ten years from now with that amount of confidence,” Sterling says.

Since 1998 Sterling has put that certainty to good use in the CI Global Boomernomics Sector fund, an $814 million portfolio he manages for Canada’s CI Funds. The fund’s mission is to invest in sectors that Sterling believes will be most affected by population trends, especially the aging of the baby boomers, or those born between 1946 and 1964. The fund has returned 6% annualized since its launch, versus 1% for the MSCI World Index.

One way Sterling digs into demography is to identify”longs” and “shorts” via consumption survey data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A sector the numbers favor: medical devices, especially implants and prosthetics. In 2011 the first wave of baby boomers will hit 65, and failing joints will be a big problem for this group.

Other demographic longs are cruise ships, recreational vehicles and low-end real estate. The latter category plays more off the “echo boom,” or the children of the baby boomers, now headed into their twenties. An example of a demographic short would be winter sports. “Not good,” Sterling chuckles. “Fifty-year-olds might like to think they’ll do a lot of skiing, but they’ll probably take a cruise instead.”

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If you are going to own a share in a business, buy into a business in a country that likes business. You’ll probably do better that way.

Some countries bury their entrepreneurs in red tape. Others welcome job creators and foment economic growth. You can find out which is which–which countries, that is, are best for business–by looking up data from the International Finance Corp., the World Bank’s private-sector development arm.

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It’s a big world out there–49,000 stocks trade on overseas markets. You can throw up your hands and have a mutual fund do the picking for you. Or you can be your own portfolio manager. Over the next four pages we provide a jumping-off point for your search. These are 125 foreign stocks that are cheap by at least one of three different classic measures.

Despite the rally in most bourses over the past year, stocks are less expensive than they were five years ago. Since mid-1999 the U.S. and Japanese markets and the Morgan Stanley Capital International EAFE Index of European and Asian stocks are all off between 13% and 22%. Five years ago the average Japanese stock was going for 45 times estimated profits for that fiscal year. Now it costs a mere 16 times expected earnings. A handful of dicier markets have done very well since 1999; both Turkey and Russia would have better than tripled your money in dollar terms.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. – It’s always a little nerve-wracking when big businesses or government bureaucracies wager on a new technology, especially when the technology in question involves the fate of thousands of suppliers and billions in inventory. So Wal-Mart Stores and the U.S. Department of Defense have no doubt rattled some with their embrace of radio frequency identification, or RFID, as the next big thing for managing their supply chains. Both outfits have deadlines this coming January for significant RFID rollouts.

But between the two RFID efforts, which will likely prove more challenging for the organization and its suppliers? That’s an easy one: the Pentagon’s. “Their needs are probably the most robust and exhaustive of anyone, way more than whatever Wal-Mart is thinking,” says Ann Grackin, chief executive at ChainLink Research, a Cambridge, Mass.-based logistics consultant that advises both the U.S. military and its contractors.

Some background on RFID: The technology, around since the 1940s, is the same used for automated highway toll collection and key chain devices to open car doors. For years, RFID has been touted as the successor to bar codes as the best way to keep track of merchandise. Tagged with RFID chips, boxes and cases of merchandise will automatically transmit information from embedded RFID chips to “readers” throughout the distribution process. The promise: less work and better-stocked shelves–or better-equipped soldiers.

In mid-2003, Wal-Mart upped the RFID ante by asking its top 100 suppliers to put tags on cases destined for Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores in the Dallas/Fort Worth area by January 2005. By 2006, Wal-Mart expects all its suppliers to be on board with RFID.

The Pentagon, which had already had success with RFID in certain war zones, announced in October 2003 that its suppliers, save those in “bulk commodities,” would have to have RFID tags on cases by January 2005. About 40,000 vendors do regular business with the military.

So what makes the Defense Department’s RFID initiative tougher? Beyond the security difficulties inherent in dealing with combat operations, Grackin points out some unevenness in the military’s facilities; it has some of the best warehouses and depots in the world but also some of the worst. That’s not the case with Wal-Mart.

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