What Difference Does it Make?.

The ancient sages would have surely frowned upon the use of supernormal abilities to obtain something as crass as money, but in today’s increasingly secular world, almost anything goes (and unfortunately to most everyone’s detriment, as the sages tried to warn us).

But setting aside the wisdom of engaging in such activities, we may still wonder if it is possible to use supernormal abilities to beat the financial markets. The answer appears to be yes.

Greg Kolodziejzyk is an Ironman triathlon competitor who holds world records on recumbent bicycles and pedal-powered boats. Like most extreme athletes, Kolodziejzyk is unfazed by the impossible. He decided to see if he could use precognition (using a method adapted from remote viewing, a modern euphemism for clairvoyance) to earn money in the futures market. Starting in 1998, Kolodziejzyk traded futures in the S&P 500 index, US Treasury notes, Wheat, Oil, Gold, Swiss Franc, British Pound, and the Canadian Dollar. In each case he predicted whether to buy or sell these futures from one day to two weeks ahead of the trading day.

Using a systematic analytical approach he developed to refine his remote viewing abilities, from May 1998 to September 2011 Kolodziejzyk made 285 trading attempts based on 5,677 remote viewing sessions. Of those, 53% correctly predicted the behavior of the futures markets. Considered as an experiment in precognition, such an outcome was unlikely to occur by chance with odds greater than 31,000 to 1. Kolodziejzyk also found that as his remote viewing confidence improved, that his correct trading decisions also improved.

Among the 285 trading attempts, 181 led to decisions with high enough confidence that Kolodziejzyk felt comfortable enough to risk actual money. Some 60% of the resulting 181 trades were profitable. Starting with $50,000 in capital, his net profit was $146,000.
Could similar profits have been made by a team of monkeys randomly tossing darts at a list of stocks? It is usually difficult to assess the likelihood of success in stock market trading, but in this case we know exactly what the likelihood was because this was conducted as an experiment, where chance outcomes were known in advance. If we asked 31,000 teams of monkeys to toss darts at stocks, and it was actually true that over the long term it is impossible for monkeys to outperform the stock market, then we would see results as good or better than Kolodziejzyk’s outcome just once.

And his profit speaks for itself.

Still, Kolodziejzyk’s case is not a fair test to assess the value of using precognitive superpowers for making money on Wall Street, because professional traders don’t rely solely on psychic information to make a decision. They make the best analytical choices they can based on all available information, and only then, faced with making a final decision to buy or sell without any additional sources of information, would they turn to precognition. And that could be the secret factor that results in the difference between profit and loss.

For millennia, methods for developing superpowers like precognition were tightly held as a secret teaching passed down from teacher to student. The sages knew that without substantial moral and ethical development most of us are too immature, and too easily seduced by money and power, to safely develop and use the superpowers without harming ourselves or others. Today, these teachings are no longer secret. Whether we are collectively strong enough to use them wisely, time will tell.