From time to time, you'll hear someone say that the stock market is best described as a market of stocks. Translation: When it comes to investment decisions, don't fret over the big economic picture, or things like rising inflation, currency turmoil or shifting economic growth. Instead, look for companies that are likely to perform well over the longer term, no matter what the current investing landscape looks like.

This so-called "bottom-up" approach has a good track record. (It's worked very well for some of the biggest names in the investing business - just ask Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch.) But it's not the only lens through which you can view the stock market. There's also a "top down" approach that focuses on spotting macro trends early. Get the big economic picture right, and the profits will follow - without the fuss and bother of trying to figure out which company will do marginally better than another.

The top-down folks, at least the clever ones, have an advantage over bottom-up investors. Armed with a sense of how the world is changing, they can make bigger bets on specific areas of the market that are likely to succeed. When they make the right calls at the right time on various sectors - say, tech in the 1990s or defence stocks after the Sept. 11 attacks - the results can be spectacular. Take Eric Sprott, CEO and portfolio manager at Sprott Asset Management, for example. He has a well-earned reputation for making bold bets on big ideas and has an uncanny ability to predict highly profitable investing themes. He made an early foray into commodities, for example, well before the current boom drove up stocks across the sector because of surging demand from China.

More recently, Sprott has been narrowing his focus to uranium, on the premise that the world is turning its attention to nuclear energy in order to diversify away from oil and to find cleaner energy sources. Sure, he will prefer one uranium producer over another, just like any bottomup investor, but it's the big idea that will drive his results. And it is certainly hard to argue with the numbers he has produced so far: His Sprott Canadian Equity Fund has a 10-year average annual return of 27.5% and is up 20% this year alone. Over the past decade, it has appreciated 1,031%. Those kind of numbers put it miles ahead of the S&P/TSX Composite Index, which has returned about 155% over the past decade and is up just 6% this year.