What if you’re wrong?

What if you’re wrong about your predictions?

How would that feel?

Honestly, fine.

I have no problem with being wrong in public. I’m not scared anymore.

When I was a kid, I hated taking chances. Ask my parents. Let me tell you a quick story.

Basketball was my favourite sport growing up. Once a friend introduced me to it in 2003 by watching the Raptors, I was hooked. I loved playing ball and dreamt about playing in the NBA, just like every other kid does.

I set up a mini basketball court in my basement and bought multiple door nets for my house and my grandparents house. I used to watch games while shooting around on mini hoops. The practice was somewhat worth it as I was ok as a kid.

It was enough to get me onto a rep team in elementary school. We practiced for hours upon hours every week but it never translated into the game. 

Every time I entered the game, I was scared.

I’ll never forget a moment when I was a kid. I was in my bed about to sleep with my door open and overheard my parents talking about my performance at a game that happened that day. My dad specifically mentioned how I was scared in the game. I could do all of the moves and was beating all these kids in practice, but I never did it in a game. 

I was scared of failure. I was scared of turning the ball over or looking like an idiot or letting my team down.

What I didn’t realize till after reading Mindset, a book by Carol Dweck, was that failure is the only way forward. Failure should be celebrated. You should enjoy failing. You only advance by failing over and over again. Success is failing 99 times and being right once.

The reason I wanted to mention this story is I’m not scared of failing anymore.

I’m not scared of other people’s opinions of me. I don’t care about who they think I should be. I don’t care if they think I’m crazy. I don’t care if they laugh at me because I’m wrong.

I’m not scared anymore.

I now know through the last few years that failing more than anyone else is the only way to be really successful. To achieve mega success, particularly in the investment field, you have to take advantage of an opportunity where your asymmetric upside is potentially infinite.

By writing about this possible market crash, what’s the worst thing that can happen? I’m wrong and have hundreds of pieces of content that I can refer back to in the future.

What’s the best possible thing? My life changes forever. I have proof I predicted a market crash. Not just that I predicted it, because any reasonable investor can see we’re in a bubble, but how exactly it happened. The great unraveling of hedge funds through the short squeeze of multiple meme stocks causing the largest wealth transfer in the history of the stock market.

I wrote about all of that.

When I started this writing journey at the beginning of 2021, I had no idea what I was going to write about. My idea of success was 100 original pieces of content about whatever I wanted to write about. I didn’t know what was going to happen this year, but as I kept digging into the stock market and GME/AMC situation, I saw something that few people saw.

Now if I’m right, I don’t just have proof that I predicted it, but I’ve set up my portfolio to maximize this outcome. 

It’s not just enough to predict these stocks increase but what else happens? I bought 3x leveraged inverse ETF options on the Nasdaq and S&P, 3x inverse leveraged options against the banks and shorted some of the largest holdings of the hedge funds. Sure AMC and GME are the only plays in the market, but by understanding second and third order consequences, I may have set up one of the great portfolios of the decade. 

I also protected my downside to make sure these outcomes are as far into the future as possible because timing this is impossible.

To achieve great success you have to take great risks. You have to be willing to look like an idiot in the short term to look like a genius in the long term. When you see an opportunity that few others see, you have to go all in. History rewards the risk takers, not those who sat on the sideline and watched it happen.

So be wrong more often. Go take more risks. Go look like an idiot. Once you get this idea out of your head that people care about what you do, life becomes more interesting.

So what if I’m wrong? It won’t be for lack of trying.