Ten for ten
Become a market prophet by Friday.
You have no idea where the market is going. Nobody does. Send a tip to 1,024 strangers anyway, and watch what ten weeks of luck can do.
Each square is a stranger. Half get “the market goes up this week”. The other half get “down”.
What the last person on your list sees
Inbox: 10 messages from you
How the trick works
Every week you tell half the list “up” and the other half “down”. One half is always right. Next week you only write to that half. After ten weeks, one person has seen ten perfect calls in a row. To them you look like a genius. To everyone else you just went quiet.
A perfect record is easy to make when nobody sees the other records. That is true of emails, fund launches and AI trading bots alike.
This is real
The mathematician Jordan Ellenberg tells this story as the “Baltimore stockbroker” in his book How Not to Be Wrong. The magician Derren Brown did it on British television in 2008, in a show called The System. He started with 7,776 people and five horse races with six horses each. Six times six times six times six times six is 7,776, so one person saw five winners in a row.
When someone shows you a perfect record, ask: how many other records did you send out?
Sources
- Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong (Penguin, 2014), the Baltimore stockbroker. Reviewed in The Guardian, 2014.
- Derren Brown, The System, Channel 4, 2008: 7,776 people, five races. Described in “The Sin of Hidden Flexibility”, De Gruyter.