Chris’ note: Our mission at Legacy Research is to unearth investment ideas you won’t hear in the mainstream. The kinds that give you a powerful edge in the market.
We’ve brought you former Wall Street insiders… folks who’ve held C-suite positions at top Silicon Valley companies… and traders who’ve worked at top-performing hedge funds.
But recently our search has spread out over to the other side of the globe. And that’s where we discovered a reclusive genius who’s arguably the greatest economic forecaster alive… and maybe of all time.
Phil Anderson tracks an 18.6-year real estate cycle and its key relationship to stocks. And using this knowledge, he’s been able to forecast every major market move over his 34-year career.
Phil’s ideas will be new to most Legacy readers. So, I’m featuring some introductory insights from him in the Cut. Below, he shows the link between the real estate cycle and the stock market… and why most mainstream pundits are wrong about what’s coming next for both.
It was 1991. And London had a problem…
The city was experiencing a surge in homelessness.
And an enterprising duo, John Bird and Gordon Roddick, hit on a solution.
They founded The Big Issue. It’s a magazine created exclusively for homeless people to sell and generate an income from.
The model was a success.
Since 1991, vendors in Britain have sold 220 million magazines.
If you stacked all the magazines on top of each other they’d stretch for 455 miles. That’s well beyond the International Space Station.
And all that sales data revealed something …
Vendors learned quickly they could sell more magazines on busier street corners. If they were on quieter streets, they sold fewer copies… even with the same amount of labor.
Some vendors bid for the top locations. Others were willing to defend their spots with violence.
It’s a simple observation: Certain pieces of land produce more value, independent of labor.
And that’s the key to understanding the 18-to-20-year real estate cycle I base my forecasting on.
Yesterday, I shared how I discovered this cycle. Today, we’ll look at how land values dictate the course of economies and markets. This insight can be enormously profitable. It’s helped me predict every major market move since I discovered this cycle 34 years ago.
Here’s short list of some of my bigger accurate calls…
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Housing crash in the early 1990s
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Dot-com crash in 2000-2002
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Bull market in stocks from 2003-2008
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The housing crash in 2007 and the global financial crisis (“GFC”)
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The bottom in stocks in March 2009 after GFC
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The bull market in stocks in the 2010s
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The pandemic-induced crash in early 2020
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The selloff in 2022
I can get a whole lot more specific with these calls. But these are the broad strokes.
How is this kind of accuracy possible?
Ricardo’s Rent
I’ve made it my life’s work to understand how economies and markets really work.
What I discovered is that market moves are not completely random. They move in cycles. History repeats.
It all comes down to the land market, which rises and falls every 18 to 20 years. It charts the direction of economies, markets, and everything in between.
If you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you. But allow me to prove it. And to do that, we need to meet David Ricardo and understand his Theory of Rent.
Born in 1772, British economist Dave Ricardo is a key figure in understanding the 18-year cycle.
In 1817, he observed that wheat prices were increasing at the same time as arable land prices.
This posed an interesting question. Was the rising value of wheat driving up land rents? Or were the rising land rents pushing up the price of wheat?
Ricardo determined that the rising price of wheat was pushing up the value of land. The more farmers could fetch for their wheat at market, the more they were willing to pay to rent land to grow it.
Like the magazine vendors who were willing to bid on preferred locations, famers knew that the profit opportunity was higher even with the same amount of labor.
And this relationship between land prices and the economy isn’t restricted to farming.
Boom-Bust Market
All economic activity is dependent upon land. It’s the foundation the rest of the economy sits upon.
Agriculture is an obvious example. But even the digital economy requires land.
E-commerce giant Amazon owns 16.7 million square feet of land for its distribution facilities. Airbnb boasts 4 million homes on its network.
And as Ricardo’s theory tells us, people are willing to bid up prices for the most productive land.
Farmers will bid up land that yields more crops. Amazon will bid up land close to its customers. Airbnb renters want homes in hip locations. And it’s this bidding for and purchasing of land that makes a market.
All markets, by their nature, have booms and busts. But the land market and the stock market are joined at the hip. So, its booms and busts in the real estate market have knock-on effects in the stock market, too.
And you can use how they interact to accurately forecast each market…
How to Read the Real Estate Cycle
That’s because the two cycles interact in a predictable way…
At the bottom of the 18-to-20-year cycle, the stock market that leads the way into the next upcycle.
Take the bear market in stocks in March 2009. This came after the roughly 50% selloff in the S&P 500 following the 2008 crisis. And it was the clue to real estate investors that the cycle was finished, and we were shifting into a new one.
Now, if you’re a real estate investor, knowing this is a huge advantage. You’ll have more backbone when you’re buying at those extreme lows sitting on that knowledge.
That’s what I did at the bottom of that cycle. I got together with some other investors. And we bought commercial properties for pennies on the dollar – an investment that is still paying off today.
And at the top of the cycle, it’s the land market that peaks first.
So, if you’re a stock investor, you should be watching land prices and the prices of stocks that operate in the real estate business.
So, if we go back to the 2007 peak, the homebuilders and the land developers peaked in 2005. That was a hint for stock market investors to start getting more defensive with their portfolios.
We’re going to hit the top of the cycle mid-decade. But we’re not there yet…
Real estate and stocks won’t crash for years yet.
Instead, I expect in 2023 what we’ll see is something I’m calling “The Eleventh Hour.” It’s a unique period of panic that appears at a specific point in the 18-to-20-year cycle.
The last time this happened, I notched a 100% win rate on nine trades… with an average gain of 485%.
So, I’m airing an exclusive interview next Tuesday, April 11, at 10 a.m. ET. I reveal the details behind this panic… and why it’s vitally important for your wealth that you get this next period in the market right.
So, go here to sign up with one click.
Regards,
Phil Anderson
Editor, Cycles Trading with Phil Anderson
P.S. My ability to predict major market moves based on the 18-year cycle has given me an incredible edge in the market.
And I want folks to be able to understand the cycles that drive these markets… so they can protect and grow their wealth – through upturns and downturns.
So go here to RSVP and tune in for the details on the upcoming panic at my Eleventh Hour event next Tuesday, April 11, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. ET.