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Being on the outside is the same as being taken for a ride. The news hit like an ice cube sliding all the way down your spine: Warren Buffett, the wizard of finance, is retiring.
You know the story: Warren, nicknamed the Oracle of Omaha, son of a businessman and senator (the two often go together…), who never worked a day for anyone else, thanks to which he quickly became a multimillionaire. As Wikipedia puts it, he “amassed a massive fortune thanks to his success as an investor”:
Forbes puts it at a little over US$160 billion, which makes him the fifth richest person in the world. Holy moly!
For that, to begin with, he had something to invest. He managed to take control of an existing company—Berkshire Hathaway—and from then on it was all downhill, coasting.
Today his interests range from insurance and financial services to energy, manufacturing and retail.
Best of all, Wall Street credits Warren with the gift of divination, the gift of prescience (which means knowing the future), not to mention the quality of infallibility: whatever Warren touches turns to gold.
Of course, it all goes back to age-old techniques, infinitely more down-to-earth, such as burning incense or Palo Santo wood, which is said to cleanse negative energies and create a relaxed atmosphere for meditation.
In our astonishing modern age, this goes by the name of privileged information, stock market manipulation, or being on the inside—a term not to be confused with being taken for a ride, which is more like being on the outside.
It’s no accident that the Stock Exchange is a kind of casino where nobody can read their own fortune. What goes on there is speculation, a little game won by those on the inside. This comes from a very serious European financial publication (Le nouvel Économiste, Paris):
The quarterly results of the tech giants once again unleashed an avalanche of announcements about investments in data centers for AI: Meta will devote at least 70 billion dollars this year, Google is planning more than US$90 billion, and Microsoft expects to double the size of its data centers in 2026. Which is making the fortune of Nvidia, whose market value reached US$5 trillion last week, and of the superstar OpenAI, valued at US$500 billion… “without ever having recorded the slightest profit.”
Without daring to write the word “bubble,” Goldman Sachs analysts sounded the alarm, mentioning “a risk of overinvestment.”
In plain English, this means that the mousetrap is working at full tilt, and that millions of gullible souls are rushing to buy ever more expensive shares or bonds, with nothing to justify their price.
In the case of Nvidia, its founder Jensen Huang has seen his fortune rise to US$180 billion while owning only 3.6% of the company’s shares: he sold the rest; that’s why he’s a multibillionaire.
Yours truly, who owns little more than the soles of his shoes, received a personal phone call:
“Hello, Mr. Casado?”
—Yes, speaking…—
“I’m calling because we have a spectacular investment offer that will multiply your savings…”
That was the moment I felt my unwelcome caller was trying to pull a fast one on me, and I stopped him dead:
—First I’d have to have some savings, pal!—
I wasted my breath: it was a robot, one of those contraptions that nowadays call you again and again, tirelessly, to sell you any old nonsense.
It was what they call a dodgy financial outfit, run by gurus like the one described by another serious European publication (Cinco Días, Madrid):
Henry Jones was a prolific American actor who died in 1999 and worked, among others, for Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo. It is also the name of the father of the world-famous fictional adventurer Indiana Jones. And it is the name used by a supposed financial expert with the aura of an oracle, who promises to make rich those who place their trust (and, of course, their money) in a murky network.
This group rests on two pillars. On one side is “TSQ Investment,” a platform that brings together investors who are given talks, training and recommendations on the cryptocurrency market; on the other, “Hellobit,” a website and platform that channels these transactions.
The system is based on a supposed financial guru called Henry Jones, able to predict whether cryptocurrencies will rise or fall at an exact moment. Little is known about him, beyond the fact that he shares a first name and surname with the actor and the fictional character. There is no contact. There are no photos. Just a text on the TSQ website highlighting his brilliant academic career.
Jones stays in the shadows despite his surprising ability to make his investment signals right 99.5% of the time by combining “quantum computing and artificial intelligence,” as his website explains. Jones’s powers of divination are not unlimited, however; he can only make predictions five times a day (no more, no less), and always at very specific times.
TSQ investors receive the signals via Telegram and only have to replicate the move on Hellobit. In this way, without any investment knowledge whatsoever, it is possible, in theory, to make money through binary options on crypto-assets. Binary options are a financial derivative whose sale is banned in Spain by the CNMV (the National Securities Market Commission) because they are extremely similar to a game of chance or a sports bet.
As the publication points out, “Hellobit” charges a commission of between 45% and 50% on every transaction. An even better business than Uber, which charges its drivers around 30%.
If you’re looking for a job, think again: these days the fashion is to become a millionaire without lifting a finger. But for that… you have to be on the inside…