The market’s closed today, for Labor Day. So I have a very special message just for you.

I want to reflect on an episode that changed the way I think about building wealth…

As you may already know, in the early 1990s, I made my first big haul, buying beaten-down junk bonds. And in the mid-1990s, I started making money hand-over-fist in technology stocks. I was making a fortune.

But by late 1998, I’d lost everything. I got wiped out in the markets. And it wasn’t just my money that was gone.

I had lost the will to live, too. Doing the math in my head, I felt I had to take my own life and let my family collect on the insurance policy.

Standing on the edge of the Metro-North platform in Grand Central Station, I made the single-best decision of my life – to not end it.

I don’t know if it was courage or cowardice that backed me off the edge of that platform. Whatever it was, I sure am grateful for it.

Friends, when you lose 10 years of wealth and become broke… it mentally beats you down. I couldn’t even work in my industry anymore. In fact, I started working in a restaurant I used to frequent on Wall Street. I had just completely lost my way.

But I learned some valuable lessons going through that dark period.

What caused me to go bankrupt wasn’t my ideas. In fact, they were usually very good and ended up working out.

Instead, it was the enormous amount of leverage I was using and a complete disregard for position-sizing.

You see, when I was wrong – even temporarily wrong – I had so much leverage, it just wiped me out.

Long story short – after a couple of years – I figured out where I had gone wrong and returned to Wall Street. Armed with a newfound respect for position-sizing and risk management, I remade the fortune I lost… and went on to become far wealthier than before.

But there’s another lesson I learned from that experience. I’ll share it with you today…

How to Build a Self-Reinforcing Money Machine

The first lesson I took from my bankruptcy was to eliminate my use of leverage. The second lesson was to focus the bulk of my portfolio positions in safe, income-producing assets.

In the past, my whole portfolio was made up of high-risk assets. I realized that just was not a sustainable approach to growing money. But I didn’t want to shun high-risk assets entirely.

This led me to the biggest breakthrough of my career: Asymmetric investing.

Let me explain…

Asymmetric investing is a strategy in which you invest tiny grubstakes in ideas with explosive potential.

So let’s say you have a traditional portfolio mix of bonds, stocks, real estate, gold, etc. You take a small percentage of your overall portfolio and put it in these explosive upside ideas.

And I’m not talking about ideas that double, triple, or even quadruple your money. I’m talking ideas with the potential to return 10,000%, 50,000%, and sometimes 100,000%.

These are binary bets. In other words, they’re going to pay off at 1,000 to 1… 50,000 to 1… or even 100,000 to 1… or go to zero.

As a younger man, I’d see situations like these, and I’d use leverage to take massive positions in them. So even if most of my ideas were right – and they were – if one of these ideas went wrong, it blew up my entire portfolio.

So instead, I carved off 2–5% of my portfolio and earmarked that money for asymmetric bets. I then started using uniform position sizes across a portfolio of asymmetric candidates. For instance, instead of putting $10,000 into one asymmetric bet, I’d put $1,000 into 10 of them.

Of course, some will do nothing. And some will go to zero. But what I discovered is a few went up so much in value, they ended up eclipsing the entire value of all my other safe assets.

In some instances, I was doubling my net worth, while only risking 2–5% of my net worth. That’s the essence of an asymmetric bet.

I didn’t stop there, either. I took the strategy a step further.

I realized I could use my safe assets to generate income. And then take that income and buy more asymmetric-risk assets, without putting my future net worth at risk.

This concept just blew my mind… It allowed me to safely take larger positions in asymmetric bets without putting my core wealth at risk.

I had, in effect, created a self-funding, moneymaking machine that has exploded my net worth to levels I have never seen before.

And I’ve done all of this while taking a fraction of the risk I used to routinely take.

Now, you never want to put money in an asymmetric bet if it puts your current lifestyle at risk… or doesn’t replenish itself on a regular basis.

But by creating a safe income stream from your core assets… you can divert more passive income into your asymmetric-risk investments without hurting yourself.

This has been my wealth-building secret.

The Next Big Asymmetric Investment

The biggest wealth-building, asymmetric investment of my life has been in cryptocurrencies. And the reason I’m talking about asymmetric investing today is, I’ve found another investment class that offers a similar return potential as cryptos.

It happens to be in a little-known corner of the stock market.

It’s called the pre-IPO market.

An IPO – or initial public offering – is when a private company lists on a public exchange. And buying in the IPO market can yield double- and triple-digit gains.

But the truly asymmetric gains come when you buy companies before they go public. In this pre-IPO market, you buy private shares… and what you’re banking on is the company will go public in the future at a much higher valuation.

Right now, there have been dozens and dozens of IPO deals completed in 2020, and the average gain for the IPO investor – that’s for the investor that bought it at the “retail” IPO price – is around 36%.

But take a look at this: The average gain for the pre-IPO investor is 22,946%. Those are crypto-like asymmetric gains.

I can smell opportunity a mile away. That’s why, to me, it looks like a whole, brand-new wave of fortunes will be made in these pre-IPO shares – just like we saw in crypto in the 2017 crypto boom.

I’ve analyzed this space, and everything suggests this trend is just getting started. So I’ve been working feverishly to identify pre-IPO opportunities I can bring to you.

That’s why on Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET, I’m going to hold a special event called the Set for Life Summit.

During this event, I’ll talk about the pre-IPO market… and reveal details about a pre-IPO deal in one of the hottest sectors in the U.S. capital markets – biotechnology.

It’s an idea I think could lead to explosive crypto-like gains.

And the beauty is that, just like what I’ve done with crypto, you don’t have to risk a lot in order to make a lot. So it’s another avenue to massively grow a small amount of capital that could end up eclipsing your entire net worth.

I want you to come join me this Wednesday, September 9, at 8 p.m. You can make up your own mind after you tune in. You owe it to yourself to find out how this opportunity works and how it can transform your financial life forever.

Let the Game Come to You!

Teeka Tiwari
Editor, Palm Beach Daily