Editor's note: Today, we're sharing another guest essay from Landon Swan of our corporate affiliate TradeSmith.
Landon and his brother Andy have made a career of using vast amounts of data to spot the biggest trends and opportunities – before most investors have any idea.
In this essay, Landon shares how he and Andy got their start in investment research... and the engine behind their proprietary approach to the markets...
It all started when I was a kid making $2 bets at Ellis Park...
Tucked into Henderson, Kentucky – just across the Ohio River from where I grew up in Evansville, Indiana – it's one of the oldest racetracks in America.
Here's me in a winner's circle photo from July 21, 1989.
That's me in the middle, making the "We're No. 1" sign for the camera.
My older brother, Andy, is the tall boy to my left. Mom is behind me. Dad, in the striped yellow sports shirt, towers just off her right shoulder.
Then there's Grandpa Rock. He's the proud guy in the middle with the hat, suspenders, and pocket protector. His horse, Rockin Liz Ann, had just placed first in a race.
My brother and I had a normal childhood, with one exception: Grandpa Rock owned thoroughbreds. And some of my best boyhood memories are of the trips we took with him across the Ohio River to Ellis Park.
My parents always gave Andy and me $2 each to make bets – with one condition. We could choose win (where the horse finishes first), place (where the horse finishes first or second), or show (where the horse finishes first, second, or third)... But we had to bet on Grandpa's horses.
My time at the racetrack ignited a love affair with statistics, probabilities, and forecasting. And it would prove as useful for trading stocks as it was for betting at the track.
Andy and I went on to work together at TD Ameritrade before setting up our own investment research company, LikeFolio...
And in 2019, we partnered with leading financial-technology company TradeSmith (a corporate affiliate of Altimetry), where we run our MegaTrends advisory.
As the name suggests, we invest early in market megatrends. These are powerful, long-term shifts in technology, society, or the economy that reshape entire industries... and can create enormous wealth for early investors.
Our track record shows it's a winning strategy. Over the past five years, we've delivered 31 triple-digit wins to our subscribers.
And over the past 12 months alone, we've given them the chance to close out gains of...
- 143% on space-infrastructure company Redwire (RDW)
- 145% on online-learning provider Stride (LRN)
- 227% on chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
- 461% on under-the-radar nuclear player Oklo (OKLO)
- 556% on trading platform Robinhood Markets (HOOD)
And right now, our system is flagging an emerging trend that could make them look small by comparison.
I'll get to that in a moment... and how it led us to our first collaboration with Joel and the Altimetry team.
First, it's important you know how we find these and other big winners. It's something 99% of regular investors ignore.
But it's the single most important signal we've found in 25 years of tracking markets. And it has nothing to do with earnings calls, analyst upgrades, or anything Wall Street typically follows.
Most of the folks on Wall Street look at earnings reports, analyst notes, and the news cycle...
And that's part of the picture.
But before a company reports a great quarter, people are already out there buying its products, telling their friends, and searching for it online.
The earnings report just confirms what was already happening. We wanted to measure that momentum while it was still building – before it showed up in the numbers.
So Andy and I built a quantitative engine that tracks millions of data points every day across social media, search trends, and web traffic.
It spots the products, brands, and companies gaining momentum on Main Street before they become news on Wall Street. And it does that by capturing and analyzing millions of consumer data points from across the web every single day. This includes...
- Posts on X, Reddit, and YouTube
- Company-level web traffic trends and app usage
- Search trends and AI queries
In one day, it crunches millions of data points from all over the web. It then distills this into a proprietary measure of real-time demand that we call the "Social Heat Score."
Imagine what it can learn about consumer behavior from everything millions of people are posting, searching, and sharing across the entire Internet.
Today, some of America's top hedge funds and institutions pay as much as $750,000 a year for access to the research our system produces...
It gives them an X-ray view into profitable trends related to hundreds of publicly traded companies.
We even received an endorsement from Georgetown University with a study that proved our technology could help predict future outcomes.
So when Andy and I met Joel at a recent conference in Washington, D.C. – and discovered that his Altimeter system was flagging the same emerging theme that was lighting up our Social Heat Score – we knew it was a big deal.
Because here's the thing about Joel's system... It has nothing to do with social media or consumer trends.
Longtime Altimetry subscribers know the Altimeter forensically rebuilds company financial statements from scratch. It strips out the accounting tricks that hide a stock's real earnings power from the rest of Wall Street.
It's the kind of work that has made Joel a go-to resource for 150 of the world's top 300 money managers, including every single one of the top 10.
Our system looks up from the street. His looks down from the boardroom. Now, they're both pointing at the same stocks... and one of the most urgent infrastructure crises America has ever faced.
If you've been reading Joel's research, you already know this story...
He has been making his case about AI and energy for months.
One large data center consumes as much electricity as 2 million homes. Hundreds more are in the pipeline and can't yet get a grid connection.
It's why the Department of Energy is projecting a 100 times spike in blackouts by 2030. It's why President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency and launched what he called a Manhattan Project-scale initiative to fix it.
It's also why I'm writing to you today.
The companies solving America's AI energy problem aren't just lighting up on Joel's radar... They're also showing up in the consumer trends data we track online.
My system has been tracking the surge in consumer and investor attention around AI energy infrastructure for months. Joel's system has been running the financial statements of nearly every microcap in that sector.
Together, we've homed in on four small, largely unknown companies sitting right at the center of this build-out – with massive earnings distortions and the kinds of catalysts that have historically sent stocks soaring 10 times, 20 times, and beyond.
We're revealing all on July 2 at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
Three powerful market catalysts are set to converge around that date. We believe the window to get positioned ahead of them is open right now – and won't be for long.
Reserve your free spot for the U.S. AI Summit here, and you'll be among the first to hear everything Joel and I have found.
I hope you'll join us.
Cheers,
Landon Swan
Cofounder, MegaTrends
