As for being the greatest forecaster, for 2025 alone I correctly predicted:
First: That the economic fallout from both the imposition and reversal of Trump’s tariffs would be negligible, since the U.S. economy is dominated by Big Tech and services, not tariff-sensitive durable goods.
Second: That Trump would delay the Bitcoin reserve and that the ‘crypto president’ narrative would collapse, and I profited from this. As I correctly predicted in late 2024 and early 2025, Trump left crypto donors out to dry. Zero help from him after taking their money.
Third: That Trump would not lose voter support over Iran and backing Israel despite the protestations of a vocal online minority. The “Fuentes wing” of The Right has no power or influence despite inordinate media coverage and Nick’s popularity as a livestreamer.
Fourth: That Trump’s strikes against Iran would be a success again despite predictions of failure. Trump always defies the doubters when it comes to foreign policy.
Fifth: That stocks would rise, no AI bubble, and Bitcoin falling despite tech stocks surging. AFIK, I was the only person to predict a tech/AI boom and a crypto crash. Everyone else either predicted tech stocks, AI, and Bitcoin would crash together–or–all three would boom together. People just erroneously lumped Bitcoin as being a tech stock or like AI. Good forecasting requires granularity.
Sixth, related to the tariffs, that inflation would remain low and GDP strong despite predictions by “esteemed experts” of runaway inflation, recession, stock market crash, stagflation or other crisis. Correct again.
All of these carried through to 2026, with Bitcoin down another 25%, no mention of Bitcoin by Trump, Coinbase and MSTR stock down 30% or more, versus QQQ only being down 25 for the year. To visualize this:
The CPI came in cool for the month ending January 2026, “Consumer prices rose 2.4% annually in January, less than expected.” Same for US GDP, which also surpassed expectations coming in strong at 4.4% for Q4 of 2025, defying predictions of tariffs hurting the economy:
For all of 2025, Trump mentioned Bitcoin just once on Truth Social, and nothing for 2026 (which is how I expect it to remain). Yet the media is still operating under this notion that he’s a ‘crypto president’. Generally, people signal enthusiasm by talking about something more than once. If a child wants to go to Disneyland or get a new toy, he doesn’t mention it once and move on; he can’t shut up about it. When Bush wanted to invade Iraq, he also spoke about it constantly to make the case for war to the public. Or Obama and his push for healthcare reform. The silence, save for a single mention in June 2025, suggests it’s a very low priority, as I predicted.
A year later, with Bitcoin 50% off the highs, the media is coming to the same realization I had, which is that the ‘crypto president’ narrative was just an illusion:
On top of that, Anthropic last week raised $30 billion at $380 billion–another record high valuation. Right again.
I had the epiphany that whoever knows the system can win at life. The world could be broken into discrete systems or blocks, which could be understood. So deciphering the system meant always being ahead. And second, capital flows are governed by systems and narratives. Much of the world is unknowable or random, but enough of it isn’t that it’s possible to understand those non-random parts and get a big edge. To outsiders it would appear like reading the future, but without violating the laws of physics.
Knowing the system in advance means knowing how capital will be allocated. When Covid came along, or the 2025 tariffs, I already had the system developed, so making money became really easy. Just like the chud meme says, “nothing never happens.” This is not to be taken literally that things never happen. Obviously, things do happen, like Covid or 9/11. It’s more like things quickly revert to the status quo. But the point is, things are quite predictable once you understand the underlying system, and then betting accordingly that the underlying trend will be restored.
But at some point, you will need to update your ‘software’ to take into account paradigm shifts. For example, Bitcoin was a great investment up until early 2018, and it has since lagged tech stocks: That narrative had died. Or emerging markets, which outperformed the S&P 500 up until 2011. The S&P 500 and QQQ has since trounced emerging markets. And of course, the post-2023 boom in AI. I was initially skeptical, but in mid-2024 I got on board, investing in Nvidia.
If you ask what intelligence is, you’ll get many answers. ‘Information processing’ and ‘pattern recognition’ are two major aspects. I could learn things really fast. For example, in the span of a couple years I fully understood finance, including the intricacies of derivatives pricing. Also related to IQ are ‘synthesizing information’ or ‘forming connections’ between disparate pieces of information or ‘narrative chunks’. In the case of trading–which requires pattern recognition, identifying macro shifts/narratives, and forming correct mental models–the relevant subtest is “Perceptual Reasoning” on the WAIS IV:
This is why the stock market is analogous to an IQ test, except with higher stakes, that of course, being money. And many competitors, those being large firms and competing traders, drawn from a pool of the best minds in the world. So being the best without even really trying, probably signifies some uncommonly high intelligence.