How Steve Jobs' Shocking Advice Could Deliver 390% Gains

It’s turned scores of investors into millionaires.

It goes against everything taught in business school… and against conventional wisdom… yet it’s helped many businesses go from nothing to a billion dollars in a few years.

We’ve all heard sayings like:

“Customer is king.”

“The customer is always right.”

“You’ve got to give the people what they want.”

If you search the Internet, you’ll find thousands of articles with headlines like this from Forbes: “Listening to Your Customers Yields Success.”

But what truly great investors realize is…

If you want the potential for life-altering profits, you have to invest in companies that forget about customers.

That’s the great secret.

It’s the opposite of what you’d expect. But when you think about it, it’s absolutely true. And when you find a company doing this, you know you’re in luck.

Ford Motors is a good example. Henry Ford showed a total disregard for customers. When asked about adding color variety to cars, he famously quipped, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

He’s also alleged to have said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘faster horses.’”

And he’s not alone. Steve Jobs, legendary co-founder of Apple, only a few years ago said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

If you own an iPhone today — or have ever witnessed Jobs unveil Apple’s other game-changing products like the iPod or iPad before throngs of media and enthusiastic crowds — you understand exactly what he meant.

See, the reason most people hesitate to invest in companies trying to change the game rather than taking orders from their customers is simple.

Too much risk.

But there’s a way for you to invest in game-changing companies and still have a safe portfolio.

It’s a lot easier than you think.

All you have to do is use what I call my “20% solution.”

In short: Put 80% of your portfolio in safe, reliable assets — dividend stocks, blue chips, index funds, and the like. But keep 20% in the big ideas that are changing the world. This will dramatically increase your profit potential without taking on all the risk.

For example, assume you start with a $25,000 portfolio that tracks the broader market. The average annual return from 2002 through 2012 for the S&P 500 was a measly 4% (with dividends). That means $25,000 turns into $38,789 in 11 years.

But things can change dramatically when you add in the potential for just a few big winners.

Let’s say you invest 80% of your $25,000 portfolio, or $20,000, in the broader market to achieve that 4% return. Then you allocate the remaining 20%, or $5,000, to a collection of “game-changing” picks — stocks with the potential to snag major gains.

If the game-changing part of your portfolio averages 30% a year, then the initial $5,000 grows into $89,608 after 11 years.

Add in the $20,000 and its market return, which has grown to $30,789, and you’ve got $120,397…

And 30% from game-changers is easily achievable… many readers of my Game-Changing Stocks newsletter snag gains of 291%… 340%… even 390%. Of course, not every pick will be a winner — we are, after all, talking about aggressive growth stocks that might not pan out. But all it takes is for a few big winners to balance that out. And that’s when the real juice is added to your overall returns.

The ordinary media doesn’t cover this beat. They’ll tell you all about a discovery once it comes out — but they don’t look ahead to see where the next one is coming from.

Me, I spend my waking hours looking for game-changing companies. I spend 60 hours a week poring over a multitude of newspapers and financial journals.

Most investors can’t spend their days camped in front of a Bloomberg terminal or poring over SEC filings. And they’re not going to have much luck getting a CEO on the phone. Thankfully, that’s my job.

My smartphone is crammed with CEOs, brokers, bankers and other heavy hitters, and I talk to them every day. Once I’ve collected a mountain of data from all these sources, I distill it into a single investment idea and present it in Game-Changing Stocks.

Twice a month, in Game-Changing Stocks, I’ll introduce you to a new technology, concept or industry that could change the world. To find out who my next projected triple-digit gainers are, click here.

This article originally appeared on StreetAuthority.com as: The Shocking Words From Steve Jobs That Led To 390% Gains…

This article originally appeared on InvestingAnswers
Author: Andy Obermueller
StreetAuthority

How Steve Jobs’ Shocking Advice Could Deliver 390% Gains