I still get goose bumps when I recall the first time I saw them live.

The year was 1987. I was 10 years old, and a buddy of mine — whose father had season tickets to the Chicago Bulls — asked me if I wanted to go to a game.

“Heck yeah!” I replied.

#-ad_banner-#The fans… the atmosphere… the scale and intensity of Chicago Stadium blew me away. But now, looking back 28 years later, I realize it was one of my first lessons in investing.

And if you’ve ever been to a professional sporting event, then you too have witnessed the secret behind some of the most consistently profitable businesses in the world.

It’s the reason some investments can shower you with wealth for the long haul, while knockoff competitors come and go. It’s a simple secret, but if you understand it you’ll know how to find the best values in any industry.

Professional sports teams are what I like to call “irreplaceable assets.” You can’t simply come along and create it from scratch. A cheap knockoff can’t be developed in a Harvard dorm room by the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Think about it. A pro sports team has virtually no competition within its home city. Outside of other sports, it’s often the only game in town.

Their irreplaceable nature means they’re also a powerful tool of wealth creation for the owners. In the case of the Chicago Bulls, the team’s value has jumped 39,115% since 1972. That’s five and a half times the growth of the S&P 500 over that time, even with dividends reinvested.

Now, you and I can’t invest directly in pro sports teams. But we can take that same concept — irreplaceable assets — and apply it to other industries.

Here are a just a few examples of irreplaceable assets we’ve discovered over the years:

Hydroelectric dams: one Canadian firm we found, for example, controls more than 27 hydroelectric facilities across North America.

Toll roadways: two firms we’ve discovered own the rights to collect driver tolls along thousands of miles of roadways in France and Italy.

Skyscrapers: most people don’t know this, but you can invest in the Empire State Building via the Empire State Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ESRT).

Irreplaceable assets like these are profit machines. And because their market share can’t be assailed or easily eroded by competitors, they consistently and reliably turn out revenue streams for their owners over decades, even centuries.

To prove my point, the StreetAuthority research team created a custom index comprised of these special securities. Below, you can see the performance of our Irreplaceable Assets Index against the S&P 500 over the past 10 years.
 

As you can see, our Irreplaceable Assets index has crushed the S&P 500 by nearly 600 percentage points since 2004.

In the United States, many of our irreplaceable assets were built long ago, and there just aren’t many opportunities like the Hoover Dam or the national highway system these days. But in other parts of the world, these investments are popping up every day. In fact, my High-Yield International portfolio is already collecting dividends from some of the greatest irreplaceable assets abroad.

Right now, for example, High-Yield International subscribers are earning a solid 4.8% yield from Pembina Pipeline (NYSE: PBA), one of Canada’s largest pipeline companies.

Another one of our holdings has exclusive licenses to operate toll roads in Italy and is up 49% since we bought it in 2013.

Of course, I always have room for more irreplaceable assets in the portfolio.

That’s because, according to our research, irreplaceable assets like these have helped investors outperform the S&P 500 by more than 600% in the last 10 years.

But here’s the real reason why irreplaceable assets are so important.

You see, irreplaceable assets are one of the keys to finding a unique group of companies I wrote about last week: dividend stocks that you can buy today, forget about tomorrow and own for the rest of your life.

I can’t go into too much detail about them here. But if you’d like to learn more about the power of international dividend stocks — and the high yields that most U.S. investors are missing out on — I invite you to learn more about my newsletter, High-Yield International. If you decide it’s right for you, I’ll immediately send you the report I just mentioned, “The 3 Best International Income Stocks To Hold Forever” — absolutely free.