An investigation into extreme and unusual investment techniques

By Max Gunther

Or, how to beat the Street with a broomstick…

Since that first tulip was traded on that madly speculative exchange in 17th-century Amsterdam, some very special individuals – plungers not in the Merrill Lynch tradition – have been picking winners and harvesting huge profits with uncanny success. How?

They play the market in ways that seem weird to the rest of us – but they win! There are those who feel vibrations, play by the stars, read tarot cards, rely on extrasensory perception, dream dreams, play by numbers. Crazy? Maybe. Yet every single one of them is rich. You’ll meet them all in this peek at the occult side of the street.

If you want to play the game their way, there’s an appendix to teach you their specialised techniques; with astrology, tarot cards, witchcraft, magic squares, and other uncanny devices.

Each method is carefully explained by the author, a veteran writer of unimpeachable reputation who researched this book with the objectivity of a scientist and who vouches for the accuracy of the results described in it.

On that original tulip exchange in Amsterdam, one of Max Gunther's ancestors bought a hundred dollars' worth of bulbs in 1632 and paid a witch to insure the investment's success. By 1636 (so the story goes), Gunther's ancestor's bulbs were worth $150,000. So much for pedigree.

Max Gunther was born in England and emigrated to the US when he was 11. He attended schools in New Jersey and received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1949. He served in the U.S. Army in 1950-51 and was a staff member of Business Week from 1951 to 1955. He then served as a contributing editor of Time for two years. His articles were published in several magazines and he wrote several books, including The Luck Factor, How to Get Lucky, The Zurich Axioms, Wall Street and Witchcraft, The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way, and Instant Millionaires.