Richard Rainwater may not be worth as much as Warren Buffet, nor as famous as Peter Lynch, but his returns stack up against either of these men. This leads me to believe that there might be some insights that can be gleaned from his investment style.

A little research and I quickly learned that his strategy is basically very simple. He skims the front page of the newspaper looking for major trends in the world, and then tries to find companies that will profit from them. His prescient investments in Disney for the Bass family, and in the likes of Columbia/HCA and Ensco for his own portfolio, seem to prove that just maybe the strategy works.

Currently the man is looking at oil and natural resource stocks, betting that booms in emerging markets will drive up the demand for raw materials. Although he's chosen to go into the oil patch, there are hundreds of other opportunities that the likes of you and I can spot. After all, right here in Fooldom we're playing the networking revolution. And any market follower can tell you that more and more baby boomers are starting to invest.

Even so, I've got a warning here, Fools. Just because Rainwater says he gets his ideas from looking at the front page of the paper doesn't mean you should pop out that old morning Times and blindly buy from the headlines. I looked at the front page of the New York Times this morning and have an idea that the headline: "In a Culture of Hysterectomies, Many Question Their Necessity" is not going to lead me to find any spectacular long-term investments.

The moral of the story: you can make a lot of money investing in trends; just make sure they're big trends.

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