Two Stocks to Buy Now to Profit from the $50 Billion Big Data Industry

When looking for the best technology stocks to buy, Money Morning's Defense & Tech Specialist Michael A. Robinson has a strategy for where to start.

"Ride the unstoppable trends," Robinson said. "That's a rule that's vital if you really intend to amass meaningful wealth."

When investors identify burgeoning markets - the industries with explosive growth - they can buy shares of companies at an affordable price and watch the stock soar to record highs. It's like buying Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) stock 20 years ago.

And when it comes to innovative industries about to hit a growth spurt, Big Data is among the biggest.

"Big Data is the 'answer' to the question: How do we make sense out of the overwhelming amount of data we're generating in the Information Age?" Robinson said. "Big Data is a field in which computers crunch through massive amounts of unstructured data to look for things like online fraud or to make strategic predictions about market growth."

To see how Big Data fits into Robinson's "unstoppable trends" category, just look at its incredible rate of growth.

"Analysts note that 90% of the data we work with was created in just the last two years alone," Robinson said. "Forecasts call for this sector to grow tenfold over a five-year period, growing to roughly $50 billion by 2016."

The amount of data created daily is astonishing.

According to IBM, more than 2.5 exabytes (1 billion gigabytes) of data were created every day in 2012. Every day, more than 294 billion emails are sent and 1 billion Google searches are completed. There are trillions of operational sensors all over the world that communicate with each other, creating data with every message.

Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) alone has more than 30 petabytes (1 million gigabytes) of data. By 2020, IBM expects there to be more than 10 billion mobile devices operating globally, all creating countless amounts of data.

There's no slowing the Big Data industry, and for investors, that means there are profit opportunities if you know where to look.

Here are two Big Data companies that are on our "stocks to buy" list...