Expectations Versus Reality

Well, it’s the last weekday of 2022 and that means it’s past time to check in on my predictions from last year and see how I did.

Last year was actually the first time I made bold macro calls trying to predict the next 12 months.

Usually, I just give a list of my top stock picks for the year and call it a day.

But people like predictions, so I put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat and gave it a shot.

And it looks like I got a few right and a few wrong in a volatile year on the exchanges.

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Prediction No. 1 was that Amazon would pay out $2 BILLION in 2022.

My exact words were, “I know the company is going to be paying out at least $1.8 billion to a particular group in 2022. I’m predicting that the total that group gets will be even bigger.”

And wouldn’t you know it, as of this month, the total payment from the program to which I was referring added up to nearly $3 BILLION!

I lowballed the number a little, but I’m going to call that a win, because who’s upset about getting a few hundred million extra?

Prediction No. 2 got a little more bold. It was that we were going to face a global food shortage.

After watching the world shut down the prior year and seeing farmers and ranchers forced to plow under their crops and cull their flocks and herds, I knew it could get really bad.

Then seeing a fertilizer shortage hit toward the end of 2021 made it clear there were going to be far bigger problems than COVID-19 come 2022.

And I was right about that one too. Even the U.N. has declared a global food shortage with hundreds of millions now on the brink of starvation.

So while that’s a big loss for the global population, it’s an accurate prediction.

That’s two for two so far.

But my next prediction doesn’t seem to have shaken out exactly as I’d expected.

Last year, we were well into the variants of COVID. We’d started with the original virus, alpha, and had already made it to the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet, “omicron.”

I predicted we’d cycle through the rest of the letters and be on the omega variant by now. But we didn’t progress any further through the alphabet.

Omicron is still the variant freshest in our memory and fears.

So that’s a swing and a miss.

But as they say, two out of three ain’t bad.

But I didn’t stop there. I went on to make three more predictions.

One of those was that we’d see the advent of quantum computers in 2022.

Engineers and researchers have been working on what could be called the “Holy Grail” of computing for decades now.

But they were finally at a point where it looked like the world’s first quantum computer would become a reality.

And it sort of did, but not quite.

You see, the IBM Quantum Composer and the IBM Quantum Lab now form an online platform allowing public and premium access to cloud-based quantum computing services provided by IBM Quantum.

It’s not quite a quantum computer in every home, but it’s a huge step toward that future.

So I’m going to call this one a draw and move on to prediction No. 5…

Which was that cryptos would go into overdrive in 2022.

Wow! Talk about bad reads…

Cryptos did move fast in 2022, but not in the direction I thought they might.

Instead of reversing direction and shooting up the charts like they’ve done after large drops in the past, cryptocurrencies kept on falling pretty much all the way through the year.

After starting 2022 with a combined market cap worth well over $2.2 TRILLION, the industry has lost over a trillion dollars in value and now sits right above $800 billion.

That’s a big old “L” for prediction No. 5.

But prediction six — that investors would flock to the private markets after seeing how much money insiders made when all those SPACs took companies public in 2020 and 2021 — went a little more my way.

The public investors didn’t fare too well, as the majority of those stocks are now well below their peaks and many are even trading for less than the $10 a share the shell companies were worth pre-merger.

But people who owned shares in the companies BEFORE they went public made a killing!

And as retail investors came to realize that those private markets were open to them, they made the switch too.

So we’re calling that an accurate prediction. And that puts my score at 3-2-1, with three wins, two losses, and one tie.

It’s not perfect, but you can’t be right all the time.

Coming Soon

And to prove just how undaunted I am, I’ll be back next week with my predictions for how 2023 will turn out.

So for now, have a great weekend! Enjoy your New Year's Eve celebrations! And I’ll see you next year!

To your wealth,

Jason Williams

@TheReal_JayDubs

Angel Research on Youtube

After graduating Cum Laude in finance and economics, Jason designed and analyzed complex projects for the U.S. Army. He made the jump to the private sector as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley, where he eventually led his own team responsible for billions of dollars in daily trading. Jason left Wall Street to found his own investment office and now shares the strategies he used and the network he built with you. Jason is the founder of Main Street Ventures, a pre-IPO investment newsletter; the founder of Future Giants, a nano cap investing service; and authors The Wealth Advisory income stock newsletter. He is also the managing editor of Wealth Daily. To learn more about Jason, click here.

Want to hear more from Jason? Sign up to receive emails directly from him ranging from market commentaries to opportunities that he has his eye on.