Water is set to replace oil as the commodity to watch, as soaring global demand and scarce supplies bring home the value of this most basic resource to investors, a director at an asset manager told CNBC Thursday

You're going to see with the growing population, the greater need for water; it's the one thing we can’t do without," Ian Morley, Director at DDQ, said.

The momentum in buying commodities and selling financial stocks has made many funds a lot of money this year, but most investors have missed the investment opportunity in water altogether, according to Morley.

"This is the type of commodity that is going to be particularly strategic going forward … from an investor's point of view this has got to be a long term and a very balanced play in the markets," he said.

Morley said investors looking to profit from water should look take a holistic view, investing directly in water companies implementing technologies such as desalination as well as the infrastructure that supports them.

I'm sticking with Cramer on this one. No one has ever made money off of water. Stick with alternative energies for a speculative buy.

"no one has ever'' Cramer knows not all. I'm up 30+% in ATW since IPO.

Not even Cramer claims to know all.  LOL!  He just claims to "think" that stocks will move up or down based on how he feels about it.

If you see him very often, you know that he is often acknowledging that he was wrong about this or that...

Sometimes I wonder if he is spending as much time explaining previous wrong guesses as making new ones.  LOL!

btw, I believe in water.

Strictly speaking, we can live without fossil fuel, but without water ... well, we're all dead, and it won't take long.

GOOD TRADING TO ALL!

THIS SOUNDS ABOUT RIGHT TO ME.

Do we have sand worms in our future?

You listen to Cramer?! OH no....

What is the basis for claiming that water is in short supply?  Does the report refer to potable drinking water or to water in general?

 Water is becoming a major problem for everyone, we humans are so dumb that we pollute our drinking water with waste from factories, oil and gas run off and other things.

It only takes 1 gallon of gas to contaminate 1 million gallons of water.

An ever growing population is becoming a burden on all our natural resources, water in particler, just think how much water is wasted when we flush, now multply that by 300,000,000 people here in the U.S. alone.

How true we waste so much water every day

Whenever a resource is percieved to be plentiful, we squander it. We're doing the same with water. We won't care until the price of water increases rapidly in price or a major city has some sort of water crisis.

Thanks for another informative post, something to think about!

As a society, we should be careful to safeguard the purity of groundwater.

For example, Nebraska is fortunate to sit atop aquifers that have been fairly reliable in the past.  (If these were on land, there would be well over 30 feet of water in depth according to statistics from the Nebraska Department of Agriculture.)  Water resources are very important for agriculture in Nebraska and other parts of the Great Plains.

If biodiesal, ethanol, gasoline or pesticides contaminate this resource, it would be potentially very bad news for the planet.  Contamination would impact not only farmers and agricultural wholesalers and the companies that depend on them, but people interested in consuming produce.

For the sake of future generations, I hope care will be taken to protect groundwater resources.

without water there's no life!