What did you do this summer?
As schools all over start back up, that question will be asked over and over again.
I guarantee nobody will have the answer Ken Griffin does.
Ken isn’t a school-age child. He’s in his mid-50s, and is founder of the Citadel hedge fund, which manages more than $63 billion.
Here’s what he did this summer: He bought a dinosaur.
He dropped $44.6 million on a Stegosaurus named Apex.
I doubt he got free shipping, as Apex is 11 feet high and 27 feet long.
And if you’re wondering where you would put something that big, please don’t worry. Mr. Griffin is also building what will likely be the most expensive home on the planet – a 50,000-square-foot mansion in Palm Springs that’s expected to be worth more than $1 billion when all is said and done.
Amazing, isn’t it? Regular folks can barely pay for groceries these days, and some of these Wall Street guys are so rich they’ve run out of crazy things to buy.
Every investor needs to know how exactly they got that rich, because it’s more important than ever. If you’re not doing what they do on a much smaller scale, you’re already behind.
They’ve made all those gobs of money using computer algorithms.
A Breakthrough Discovery
This was one of the great awakenings for me when I joined the investment world more than two decades ago.
I spent time trying to pay the bills as a musician, which meant my money situation didn’t improve.
I got my break a with a very unusual institution.
Cantor Fitzgerald wasn’t a household name like Charles Schwab or Bank of America. And it didn’t have millions of clients like they did. It was a broker to the brokers – the BIG institutions.
Cantor served thousands of specialized clients, which included the biggest institutions on Wall Street — and in Europe and Asia, too. I was executing the trades that these biggest financial players on the planet were placing.
This experience gave me my first shot at trading. And more important in the long run, I got to use the firm’s computerized trading system.
For the first time, I could see the order numbers, account numbers, and transactions from these big banks hitting the stock market in real time. I could literally see millions, even billions of dollars flowing from account to account.
Four years later, after a ton of hard work, proving myself, and working my way up, I was named Head of North American Equity Derivatives, which gave me access to even more data. And that’s when I started realizing something amazing…
Our clients weren’t using connections and balance sheets to make investment decisions.
They were using algorithms to make their biggest trading decisions. I mean, nearly every firm was doing this.
I’m talking about advanced computer code that can crunch millions of data points per second and execute trades instantly. Those algorithms put the big banks at an extreme advantage over the little guys.
And it’s even more lopsided now. Independent reports from Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan estimate that Wall Street institutions account for 90% of daily trades in the stock market.
An estimated 80% of those trades, or more, are executed by machines.
That means we’re competing against trillion-dollar institutions andadvanced algorithms… which now include the latest in AI technology.
Individual investors are now at an extreme disadvantage.
But we can level the playing field.
See Where Big Money Is Flowing
Once I realized who – or what – was really controlling the money, I made a decision:
I decided to build my own algorithm.
The top 500 asset managers now control a record $131 trillion on any given day. All told, about $558 billion moves through the stock markets every single day here in the U.S. alone. That means the computer algorithms direct the flow of as much as $447 billion – per day.
I wanted to track where all that big money was flowing. I wanted to know where these institutions would pour their billions next… down to the ticker symbol.
It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears – not to mention money – but the end result is the Quantum Edge system that tracks more than 6,000 stocks.
My algorithm crunches 120 data points per stock every day, and the full code applies 29 proprietary indicators to those 120 data points. That’s millions of data points every single day, used to pinpoint stocks ripe for massive institutional buying.
One of my favorite examples of how this works – because it’s so personal – involves my father. He called me a years ago wanting to invest $5,650.
I fired up Quantum Edge system, ran the scan, and saw the readout on one stock that was plain as day. There was a lot of buying activity in the months leading up to Dad’s phone call, and that, along with the other factors, told me this stock was primed for some massive institutional demand.
Now I didn’t know how much or exactly when. But the algorithms were – according to my pattern-recognition system – lining up to pump billions into the stock.
Quantum Edge had pinpointed a then-obscure hardware stock called Nvidia (NVDA).
Each one of those green bars points to what I call “unusual institutional demand.”
Each green bar represents another unusually large influx of institutional buying.
Again, it’s not just institutional buying. They represent unusual institutional buying.
I’m talking about huge waves of demand for that stock… both present and future.
My father took my advice and is now sitting on as much as 4,000% gains. I’ve watched his $5,650 turn into about $250,000.
Everyone thinks stocks go up and down based on earnings, or news or events, or whatever. Those are important, but what really matters in this age of algorithms and artificial intelligence is where the money is flowing.
That ability to see where the money is flowing gives you an edge – the Quantum Edge. It’s like having an x-ray or MRI machine for money flows. I’ll talk in future Power Trends about some the specific data points in the system and how to try to spot Big Money on your own.
But Wall Street relies so heavily on algorithms for a reason, and to give us the best chance of success, we need to as well.
Talk soon,
Jason Bodner
Editor, Jason Bodner’s Power Trends
P.S. I go into more detail in a special briefing on “Project Greenlight.”
The whole goal was to study how algorithms (including AI) are taking over Wall Street… and to show folks how to prepare and profit.
The just-released video bulletin reveals our findings and includes a six-step strategy you can use to turn the AI-trading revolution into stunning gains, like my father did.
I also share an AI stock – down to the ticker symbol – that is instrumental in powering the whole U.S. economy.
Click here now for all of the details and to gain access to my strategy and this incredible stock.
