“Where the heck is the jet?”
The pilots were just a few hours away from “timing out.” If we didn’t get in the air soon, I’d be stuck in this Colombian mountain town for another 24 hours.
I looked over to the driver of my armored car with a questioning glance. He just shrugged as if to say, “I have no idea where your plane is.”
I’d taken the jet to a small farm deep in the Colombian jungle. I was there to research an investment opportunity. And I needed to see for myself if the owners were the real deal.
Long story short: They were. And I was anxious to get back to the States and write up a report for my subscribers.
But I couldn’t find the darn plane.
Turns out the jet was the one parked closest to me. But weariness wasn’t to blame for my oversight. The plane belonged to my host. And it’s common for men like him to churn through tail numbers.
Not because he’s a covert agent… or a drug kingpin. Instead, he’s a billionaire venture capitalist (VC).
So why the tail number switch?
Changing tail numbers makes it much harder for his rivals to track him. Now, you might be wondering why they’d do that…
It turns out you can make hundreds of millions of dollars tracking private jets.
For instance, in early January 2017, two hedge funds sensed something was up when their informers spotted Johnson & Johnson’s private jet landing in Basel, Switzerland.
The plane parked near the headquarters of a Swiss drug company called Actelion. The hedge funds bet something big was up… and bought shares in the company.
Later that month, Johnson & Johnson announced it would buy Actelion for over $30 billion. Shares soared almost 90%.
The point is my host is a wildly successful private investor. One of his private equity deals returned 460,000%.
Insiders compare him to Richard Branson and Bill Gates. There’s even an entire college named after him.
We had no idea who was tracking us… or if there was an informant at the airfield on someone’s private payroll. So my host’s paranoia was well-warranted.
Going the Extra (300,000) Miles
These types of fact-finding trips are nothing new to me. Over the last four years, I’ve traveled to 14 countries, covering some 300,000 miles.
I’ve hiked remote jungles and nearly gotten arrested in the former Soviet republic of Belarus.
Why would I put my life and liberty at risk like this?
I’ve discovered you just can’t find the best deals in the world from behind a desk.
You’ve got to get out there and walk the operations… look the owners in their eyes… and get a sense of the men and women behind the ticker symbols.
And the only way to do that is in person.
So today, I’ll tell you what I learned on that private jet trip — and why it could be your biggest moneymaking opportunity of 2020.
A Mega Wave of IPOs Is Coming in 2020
I’ve recently uncovered a record amount of VC activity in an industry currently being shunned by Main Street.
I live for these types of divergences. I’m talking about when I see smart money doing one thing and retail money doing the exact opposite.
It’s almost too easy to make money by just taking the other side of the retail public.
Some of the dumbest traders I know on Wall Street — I’m talking real meatheads here — make millions each year just by doing the opposite of their retail customers.
Anyway, when I see so much smart money going one way and the public going another, I always bet with the smart money.
And what I’ve discovered is 2020 will be the beginning of an IPO boom in an overlooked sector.
Given the scope of this VC investment, I think it could be as lucrative as the IPO boom of 1995-1999. For those of you who were active back then, you know as well as I do how amazing that time was.
Making money was so easy then. You’d get an IPO allocation and sometimes you were up triple digits by the end of the day. As great as those returns were, they paled in comparison to what pre-IPO investors made on those deals.
Here are some recent examples:
- If you’d put $250 in PayPal’s pre-IPO, you could’ve seen it grow to $2.5 million.
- If you’d put $250 in Google’s pre-IPO, it could’ve grown to $3.75 million.
- And a $250 stake in Netflix’s pre-IPO could’ve brought you a windfall reaching $14 million.
So you can see the big money isn’t in buying companies after they IPO. You need to buy them before they become public.
But until recently, you couldn’t access these “sweetheart deals” unless you were a VC like Peter Thiel or my billionaire contact.
But that’s all changing…
Forget the Crumbs, Here’s How to Get the Whole Cake
Thanks to new rules by the Securities and Exchange Commission, non-millionaires can now invest in these “sweetheart deals.”
They’re called Regulation A+ offerings. And they’re open to the general public — not just accredited investors with a net worth of over $1 million. In some cases, you can buy into them with minimums of $500-1,000.
But finding the best “sweetheart deals” isn’t easy.
Sure, you could search for deals on crowdfunding platforms like SeedInvest and MicroVentures. They list dozens of startup companies raising money from the general public. In some cases, you can start with as little as $100.
But unless you’re a hedge fund that can hire a host of informants to track planes… or have connections to billionaire insiders… you won’t get access to the deals that can make you rich.
You need an army of analysts to dig through hundreds of deals and thousands of pages of financials. And even when all the stars seem to line up… there’s no way to guarantee success.
That’s why my team and I travel hundreds of thousands of miles to meet with the founders and CEOs of private companies. We ask the tough questions… see how they respond… find out if they have the “it” factor to make it.
All of the groundwork my team and I have laid down over the last four years is about to result in the single biggest payoff I’ve seen from stocks since the ’90s.
That’s because 2020 will mark the beginning of an IPO boom that could put the ’90s to shame.
And thanks to my extensive network of insiders, VCs and CEOs… I’m in a unique position to give my subscribers access to deals they’d never even know about — let alone be able to get into.
I’m incredibly excited by what I see ahead in 2020. That’s why I laid out the details of what could be the biggest moneymaking opportunity in stocks since the ’90s tech boom.
I told folks who tuned in all about a pre-IPO deal that you can get into for as little as $250. It’s a deal with the potential to skyrocket on the first day it goes public.
I’ve asked my publisher to make a free replay available for a limited time. So be sure to watch before it comes down.
Let the Game Come to You!
Teeka Tiwari
Editor, Palm Beach Venture
• This article was originally published by Bonner & Partners. You can learn more about Bill and Bill Bonner’s Diary right here.