James Altucher, the founder of finance-junkie social network Stockpickr, further feeds the frenzy of his constituents with his new timely book, “The Forever Portfolio: How to Pick Stocks That You Can Hold for the Long Run”.

His investment categories are interesting, because they look beyond the usual P/E ratios and such and more at societal trends — specifically, those problem areas that aren’t going away anytime soon, and thus invite commercial solutions. The top addressable problems are:

1.) Obesity: This trend is never going away. People get more and more obese and some $30 billion a year in obesity-related costs are sucked out of GDP each year.

2.) Identity theft: The number of reported instances of identity theft per year hasn’t had a single downtick in 20 years, and it’s only getting worse.

3.) Money management: There’s $100 trillion in wealth on the planet and someone needs to do the job, even if there’s volatility along the way.

4.) Women’s legs: A topic very important to me and 6 billion other people. As women reach the age of 45-55 (and every year in the U.S. that demographic gets several million people larger), they deal with issues ranging from varicose veins to “what do I do with that tattoo I had put on 30 years ago that’s now all flabby.”

5.) Clean water: Half of the hospital beds in the world are filled right this second by people suffering from diseases related to unclean water. While the world’s population has doubled, our use of water has tripled since 1950. And how much more water is there to drink? Zero. Consequently, ever larger portions of the planet are using water that is deemed unsafe by current U.S. standards.

6.) Auto safety: Last year there were over 1 million auto-related deaths. That number is only increasing as people all over the world participate in the rural-to-urban move that is taking place in all emerging economies.

Intriguing. For all the financial talking-heads who boast about “thinking outside the box”, this is a rare instance of one of them actually doing so, and for that, Altucher should be commended.

About the only thing I don’t see on this list: Military contractors. Altucher’s top stock pick under clean water, Idexx Laboratories, touches on this via their bioterrorism detection work, but it’s not a true defense-weaponry play. War is another one of those things that you can always count on, in some form or another, so the companies that help supply the global arsenals would be, I’d think, solid investments.