• 6 min read
• Published on 25 July 2025
Listen to article
6:24Hey! We are Nemo.
Nemo, short for Never Miss Out, is a mobile investment platform that delivers curated, data-driven investment ideas to your fingertips. It offers commission-free trading across stocks, ETFs, crypto, and CFDs, along with AI-powered tools, real-time market alerts, and themed stock collections called Nemes.
Download the App
Scan the QR code to download the Nemo app and start investing on Nemo today
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 11 September 2026
Read article
Published on 11 September 2026
Read article
Let’s be honest, the investment world can feel like a frantic race to find the next big thing. Everyone is chasing after some disruptive tech firm that promises to change the world, and possibly make them a fortune overnight. I’ve seen it a hundred times. While that’s all very exciting, I find myself increasingly drawn to a much simpler, almost boring, idea. What if, instead of trying to build the fastest car, you just owned the road it has to drive on and charged a small fee every time it passed?
To me, this is the quiet genius behind what I call the modern toll road businesses. These aren't companies that make flashy products. They don't live or die by the latest consumer trend. They simply own the essential infrastructure, the digital and physical pathways of modern commerce, and collect a fee for its use. It’s a beautifully simple model, and in a complicated world, simplicity can be a powerful asset.
Think about the last time you paid for something with a card. That little tap or swipe sent a cascade of data flying through a network owned by a company like Visa or MasterCard. For facilitating that transaction, they took a tiny slice. It’s almost unnoticeable to you or the shopkeeper, but multiply that by billions of transactions a day, and you start to see the sheer scale of it. They aren’t selling you a product, they are selling access.
The real elegance of this model is its scalability. As the global economy grows and more people move away from grubby cash to digital payments, the traffic on their roads naturally increases. They don’t need a bigger sales team or a clever new marketing campaign. They just need the world to keep turning, which, last I checked, it has a habit of doing. It’s a formidable position to be in.
This concept, of course, extends far beyond payment networks. Our entire digital lives run on physical infrastructure that someone has to own. Consider the mobile phone towers dotted across the landscape. Companies like Crown Castle own these steel trees, and they rent out space on them to all the big mobile carriers. Every call you make, every video you stream, is generating rental income for a landlord of the airwaves.
Trying to compete with them is a fool's errand. You can’t just decide to build a thousand new mobile towers. It would take years of navigating red tape and require an obscene amount of capital. This creates what the finance types call a 'moat', a defensive barrier that keeps competitors at bay. The same logic applies to the vast, anonymous data centres that house the cloud or the sprawling network of pipelines that transport oil and gas, collecting fees on volume, not the volatile price of the commodity itself.
Now, here’s the part that should appeal to the more pragmatic investor. Many of these infrastructure businesses are rather good at sharing the wealth. Their predictable cash flow often translates into reliable dividend payments. What’s more, they can offer a degree of protection against inflation. Many of their contracts have clauses that allow them to increase their fees in line with rising prices. So, as the cost of your weekly shop goes up, so too might their revenue.
Of course, no investment is without its pitfalls. A change in regulation could clip their wings, and a truly disruptive new technology could, in theory, make their infrastructure obsolete one day. That’s why one should never put all their eggs in one basket. Spreading your exposure across different types of infrastructure, like in the Toll Road Businesses basket, could be one way to approach this, mitigating the risk that any single sector gets sideswiped. It’s about owning a portfolio of different roads, not just one.
View the full Basket:Toll Road Businesses
View the full Basket:Toll Road Businesses
This article is marketing material and should not be construed as investment advice. No information set out in this article be considered, as advice, recommendation, offer, or a solicitation, to buy or sell any financial product, nor is it financial, investment, or trading advice. Any references to specific financial product or investment strategy are for illustrative / educational purposes only and subject to change without notice. It is the investor’s responsibility to evaluate any prospective investment, assess their own financial situation, and seek independent professional advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please refer to our Risk Disclosure.
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 12 September 2026
Read article
Published on 11 September 2026
Read article
Published on 11 September 2026
Read article