It's Easy to Get Rich with Psychic Powers (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ride the Trend)

"I was very sick for a while..." January 21, 2019 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( [Altucher Confidential] It's Easy to Get Rich with Psychic Powers (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ride the Trend) [James Altucher]"I was very sick for a while. I would get piercing headaches all the time. But when the headaches finally stopped I realized I was psychic and could tell the future. I don't want this ability. It's too much of a burden and I can't shut it down." I posted that to Craigslist over a decade ago. I was lonely and just wanted to email with people. I like helping people. I would tell people I'm not psychic. But they still wanted to ask me their questions. Ask me, "What should I do?" And, this is what surprises me, I'm still friends with many of the people I emailed with. Nobody has psychic powers. But I've spent the past two decades making money on my own. And the only way to do that is to be ahead of what others are doing. To understand the problems and innovations happening in the world before everyone else does. Because this has been a key to any success I've had, I've kept my process a secret, and it's a secret that doesn't have the burden psychic powers bring. But because for two decades I've also been dedicated to total transparency and to helping people "choose themselves" for freedom, I want to share this secret. That's why, on [January 24th](, I'm holding my 2019 Predictions Summit. And I'm going to show you the future. I'll be going over my top three predictions for 2019… and I'm going to reveal how people can take advantage of my predictions to potentially 10x their money in 2019. In fact, I'll guarantee that anyone who listens to my predictions and follows my recommendations will see a chance to turn every $1,000 into $10,000, and every $10,000 into $100,000. [Add to calendar] [Google Calendar]( [iCal Calendar]( Click here to reserve your seat! [SIGN ME UP]( I feel confident making this guarantee because I'm using the same strategy I used to pick 13 stocks that went up over 1,000% and 77 others that went up between 100% and 999% over the last decade. But as I said yesterday, predicting the future is risky business. So how can you make accurate predictions? And why should you believe that my predictions hold any water? After all, even the financial "experts" on the news get the future totally wrong. CXO Advisory Group analyzed the predictions of hundreds of pundits to answer a simple question: Are the talking heads on TV right or wrong? You know, the ones who say Ebola will end the world, or the ones who said Enron was just having accounting problems. It turns out the pundits' predictions are right only 47% of the time. I think they're being nice. I would say pundits are right about 12% of the time. But I pulled that number out of a hat. And CXO did a study. So who knows? What I do know is that I've seen dozens of examples of people making millions following newsletters, message boards, and independent sources of information… But I've never heard of someone getting rich watching CNN Money or Fox Business. Let me give you a $1 million piece of advice... Don't expect the mainstream media to show you how to make a fortune from new ideas or innovations. They're always late to the party. Here's a quick example from my personal experience: May 6, 2010. The Dow dropped 1,000 points in 36 minutes. People were panicking. The New York Times reported that investors pulled $33 billion from the stock market. CNN Money called it the "year of uncertainty and volatility." Standard & Poor's chief investment strategist even suggested that we could go into a bear market back in 2010. But I staked my reputation when I put down, in print, "the S&P 500 should go back to all-time highs in the next few years." I wrote that on July 6, 2010. Anyone who bought an ETF that tracked the S&P back when I wrote that would have been able to turn every $1 they invested into $3. It was the same story back on June 1st, 2011. The Dow had just had its worst day of the year, dropping 280 points to 12,249. The S&P fell 31 points to 1,313. Everyone started to panic and once again all the newspapers started spewing their "the world is over" headlines. One economic forecaster, whose name I'll politely refrain from saying, called Dow 3,300 by the end of that year. But I turned around and called Dow 20,000 and S&P 2,000 on June 2, 2011—the DAY after the crash. Last time I checked, the S&P 500 was just about 2,700. And the Dow was nearing 25,000… which, after doing a quick back of the envelope calculation, is a bigger number than 3,300. To quote Dr. Ian Malcolm from the film Jurassic Park: "Boy, do I hate being right all the time." So, what do you think? Lucky calls? Crystal balls? Psychic powers? Everyone who is getting this email I am insanely grateful for. You have been reading me for a while. So, I want to tell you the real secret about predicting the future… The Secret Way to See the Future… Is to Listen to the Past As Mark Twain supposedly said (he didn't, but let's go with it), "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." What does "rhyming" mean here? I'm talking about trends. That's the big secret. That's my psychic power. Trends = the past + STATISTICS + standing next to the smartest person in the room (and having access to that room). It so happens we can use statistics like a crystal ball to predict the future. By doing so, we can see how trends will play out and pay off. For about 30 years, I've watched and studied trends. Social trends. Demographic trends. Technological, cultural, economic, and political trends. And then I've used my connections to make money from those trends. Here are just a few of the predictions I've made that have come true, based on the trends I was looking at: A) 1990-92. Artificial Intelligence. Almost nobody knows this about me, but I've been working on AI since 1986. I even presented a research paper at one of the largest conferences on artificial intelligence back in 1990. I worked with people like Kai Fu Lee who invented the tech behind Siri and Alexa. I worked on "Deep Blue," the first chess computer to beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. (IBM even offered me a job to work full-time on it but I didn't take it because of a relationship that lasted only two more months. Oh well...). (Not to give away too much, but I've been following this trend for decades. Right now, I'm seeing big shifts in this space. I was just ten minutes ago on the phone with one of the founders of "approximate computing" the latest trend within the latest trend of AI. I'll be talking more about that on Thursday, [January 24.]() B) 1995. The Internet. In 1994, the morning show NBC's Today had a segment where one of the anchors asked, "What is the internet, anyway?" In June 1998, mainstream economist Paul Krugman predicted the internet's impact on the economy would be no greater than the fax machine. What was I doing back then? Running my web-development company, Reset. In the late 90s, everyone wanted a website. That was the trend. I knew that eventually every single company would need a website. I didn't just write that down. I started an entire company based on that prediction. So I built websites for some of the biggest companies in America. Our clients included American Express, Con Edison, various divisions within Time Warner, BMG, Universal, and HBO. I ended up selling that company for over $15 million. (I lost all that money later. I should've paid more attention to the trends… stupid stupid me. After 2002, I got into Wall Street and worked with Victor Niederhoffer. I made my money back by spending years doing nothing BUT looking at trends and statistics.) C) 2007. Social media. I went on CNBC and I called Facebook a $100 billion company back when Yahoo offered to buy it for $1 billion. People laughed at me on TV. I saw the huge potential in social media, though. I invested in a company called Buddy Media. That made me 6,000% on my money. I also invested in Ticketfly for a 3,600% gain. I even started a business called Stockpickr from my kitchen table laptop, because I wanted to make a social media site for finance. TheStreet.com partnered with me on it. I eventually sold my stake to them 7 months after starting that company, when they valued it at $8.1 million. D) 2007, again. The subprime mortgage crisis. I'm going to say I was half-right on this one. What happened was: I went on CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge on March 23, 2007. I was looking at specific stocks and I saw that the big trend, there, had pushed certain stocks to double or triple. I didn't see any more upside, so I called that play "over." Good for me. Good for anyone who saved themselves from calamity. E) 2011. The big stock bull market. I did an interview with Maclean's back in 2011. Remember, this was back when the market crashed. I called Dow 20,000 and everyone thought I was an idiot. The Maclean's interviewer asked me if I had any forecasts for the market in the future. This is what I said: "There's going to be an enormous boom, and the reason is there's a lot of cash lying around looking for something to do. The banks have almost $3 trillion, the non-banks have another $2 trillion, pension funds have another trillion or so in savings. There's $5 trillion in this economy that's all potential customers and investors, so I think this money's eventually going to filter through and benefit all of us." Again, the trends were there, plain as day for anyone to see. Tons of cash building up, ready to deploy into the economy. Since then, the stock market exploded upward, wages are on the rise, unemployment is super low. I guess that cash found something to do. (And here's another hint for my [2019 Predictions Summit on Thursday](: This trend has only just begun.) F) 2013. Cryptocurrencies. When I first heard about bitcoin, I hated it. I even tweeted out in 2013 that "bitcoin is a fad, or a scam, or a Ponzi scheme, or worse." Then I dug into the data. I looked into the code. I read the white papers. I talked to the smartest investors and tech entrepreneurs I know. And I realized something… Bitcoin was going to stick around. And it was going to be huge. So I learned. And I reinvented myself. (Another $1 million tip: always be learning.) In fact, I became so confident in the crypto trend that I BUILT a store for my book, Choose Yourself, that ONLY accepted Bitcoin. This was back when Bitcoin was little more than a laughing stock. I even went on CNBC to talk about it, and the interviewer asked if it was a marketing stunt. I also did an interview with Business Insider back then, around May 2013, about my Bitcoin store and the reasons for setting it up... If you'd bought a Bitcoin back when I went on CNBC to talk about it, you'd have spent about $100 and ended up with over $3,600 — even with the big pullback in 2018. I even bought into Zcash with a group of investors early on. We made about 7,100% on that. G) 2016. Virtual Reality. I did an interview where I talked about the early trend I was seeing in virtual reality back in 2016. Here's what I said: "So [virtual reality] is an important trend. In the '90s the Internet was sort of the first trillion-dollar opportunity. It created trillions of dollars in wealth for investors. And then in the past 10 years mobile was another trillion-dollar opportunity unleashed by smart phones and tablets. Trillions of dollars of value were created." "Virtual reality is even bigger than the Internet. Name an industry and I'll tell you how virtual reality is going to disrupt it. That's how huge it is, and I'm already seeing it. I'm seeing it in private companies, I'm seeing it in public companies." One of the public companies I talked about in that interview was NVIDIA (NVDA). That stock returned about 560% between my interview and 2018. And this is a trend that hasn't fully played out yet. H) 2017. Cryptocurrency part 2, the Bubble. I saw the potential of cryptos back in 2013. But in 2017, everyone was on the train. The trend was there, and it started to look negative. The writing was on the wall. So in August 2017, I wrote: "99% of Cryptocurrencies are total scams. And, yes, Cryptocurrencies are in a bubble." That post is still on my blog, and it turned out to be true. (Thankfully, I haven't recommended a single crypto to my readers that turned out to be a scam!) I still think cryptocurrencies are a huge opportunity for generational wealth… this trend ain't over.  I) 2018. Marijuana. I knew marijuana was going to be big, back in the summer of 2018. This is before Canadian legalization, and before pot stocks exploded back in October. I even flew to Denver and did a "Potcast"! Since then, I've been covering this trend as it continues to play out… Giving people business ideas, stock ideas, options ideas… Some folks listened to me and made some serious money. People ask, why give out ideas for free? What else is life for? I like to help people. Life and ideas are abundant, but our time here is limited. Living a full life means being part of a wider community that you contribute to. Why am I telling you this? Because when you notice a trend, you immediately have a handful of choices: - It will tell you what stocks to buy. - It will tell you what businesses to start. - If it's a negative trend, it will tell you how you can position your family to survive. - It gives you something to talk about with your friends at cocktail parties. (This is probably the best use of a crystal ball, if you have one in your Halloween storage.) - It gives your ideas that may morph into revenue streams that nobody has ever thought of before. I can tell you that the way I make money is through finding revenue streams and picking stocks. But the easiest (and sometimes fastest) way to make money from trends is by investing. Most people never see 1,000ish% returns on a stock. But here's a snapshot of some of the investments I recommended over ten years ago and how they've performed last I checked… The fact is, if you're shooting for 10x gains, you need to be one step ahead of mainstream investors and the financial media. You need to know when trends are gaining momentum beforehand, so that you can get in on the ground floor, because that's where the life changing gains are made. So when you're looking for the biggest trends of tomorrow, you have to ask questions like: a) "What are the biggest problems in society? What are the tidal wave-like trends taking shape around the world that I can surf on top of?" b) "What are the opportunities and companies in each trend that we focus on?" I'm going to address both of those questions during my predictions summit on [January 24th, at 1 p.m. EST.]( When you're aware of what a trend can do for you — and you bring in a bit of investing knowledge — it gets real easy to see the future… and how wealthy the future-you can be. That's why I'm not ONLY going to talk about trends during the broadcast. Because knowing about a trend on its own is useless. Even if you know about it ahead of time. You also have to know what investments to make. Of course, you can always invest in stocks like Google and you'd probably do fine. That's what most people do because it's easy. But I have a different approach that could allow you to make ten times more money… It's the same strategy I used to write the book I showed you yesterday , The Forever Portfolio. I'll tell you all more about this tomorrow. Make sure to keep an eye on your inbox so you don't miss it. In the meantime, please do me -- and your future-self -- a quick favor: [If you haven't signed up for the event yet, please do so here.]( Sincerely, [James Altucher] James Altucher Subsribe To My Podcast [The James Altucher Show]( Add james@jamesaltucher.com to your address book: [Whitelist Us]( [The James Altucher Website]( [Subscribe Via Text]( [Subscribe With YouTube]( [Subscribe On Messenger]( [Subscribe With iTunes]( [Connected on LinkedIn]( Join the conversation! Follow me on social media: [Facebook Group]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Pinterest]( [Instagram]( Altucher Confidential is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not rent or share your email address. By submitting your email address, you consent to Choose Yourself Financial delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your Altucher Confidential e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from Altucher Confidential, feel free to [click here](. Please read our [Privacy Statement](. 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