Editor's note: The world is dealing with a global pandemic and the markets are uncertain...

It might seem like right now isn't a good time to invest.

But here's a little secret... The coronavirus and its ensuing market volatility actually make this the perfect time to act – if you know what you're doing.

That's why we're sharing the cover story from the March 2020 issue of online magazine American Consequences in this weekend's Masters Series. You'll learn all about a man who can show you exactly how to turn the current crisis into money in your bank...

Enrique Abeyta is a former hedge-fund manager who handled billions of dollars in his Wall Street days. He grew his first hedge fund by more than 130,000%. Now, as an editor at our corporate affiliate Empire Financial Research, he's using the same unique approach to show everyday folks how to make 500%, 1,000%, or more in the markets...

From Trailer Parks to Trading Billions

By Laura Greaver, managing editor, American Consequences

With his tanned skin covered in tattoos, dark beard reminiscent of a pirate, and casual uniform of a black T-shirt and black jeans, Enrique Abeyta isn't your typical finance guy...

Sure, he's had a successful 25-year career on Wall Street – managing high-profile hedge funds and raising more than $2.5 billion in investment capital.

But the flashy money-lined streets of Manhattan are a far cry from his roots in Phoenix, Arizona, where he grew up poor in a volatile household with an alcoholic, often-absent father.

How did he go from briefly living on the streets to making it big on Wall Street – then getting out of Dodge? He says it's easy... "It was live or die. I shut out all the noise, and I just put my f***ing head down and got to work."

That electric-current intensity was still surging when I met Enrique for the first time...

He punctuates his quick, passionate speech with laughter and curse words. He's full of what he calls "natural energy." He tells me he has never had a cup of coffee in his life.

Enrique spent his childhood in Phoenix, Arizona, and after stints in Pennsylvania, New York, and Japan, he now calls Phoenix home again... just 10 miles down the road from where he grew up... a full circle, with plenty of twists and turns along the way.

But there is a huge distance in those short 10 miles... His life now is much happier and more stable than it was growing up. He enjoys frequent desert hikes and spending time with his wife and two young children.

His mom, originally from Uruguay, and his dad, from Mexico, met and married in Reno, Nevada in an unconventional way – a fitting story for the start to Enrique's nontraditional life.

"My mom was going to be deported, but she couldn't go home because of her family situation there. Like a lot of Latin America, there was a ton of political unrest, and my family ended up on the wrong side of it. My uncle (her brother) got wrapped in it. When he was just 16 years old, he got caught driving around a couple other 'revolutionaries' and was thrown in jail for seven years. He was just a young kid... But either way, she would have been arrested as soon as she got off the plane."

Enrique's father, known as Pepe, was a hairdresser. "This was the 1960s, so you got your hair done every week." His mom, Selva, was in the salon, lamenting her citizenship situation, when another barber asked, "Why don't you just marry someone to stay in the states?" Selva replied, "Who the hell would I marry?" and he said, "Pepe! He would do something like that."

Enrique tells me, "So, they are introduced at the hair salon and Pepe says, 'Sure... Maybe.' He was sober that day. Two weeks later, she's there again, my dad rolls in f***ed up and basically goes, 'Hey, you're the one who wants to get married, right?' And she's desperate... "So they go get married. And this is Nevada, so you can get married in 30 minutes. Afterward, he says 'OK, see ya. I'm headed back to the bar.' A few weeks later, he comes to the shop, and she's there, and he's sober again. 'Hey. So yeah, we're married. Do you want to go grab a cup of coffee?' And the rest was history..."

His parents' marriage was tumultuous, mainly because of his father's drinking and upbringing. "My father had a long history of hardcore alcoholism and abuse. My dad had seven brothers – two died of AIDS, one of them is in life in prison in Colorado and if he gets out, he goes to life in prison in Texas. Just a very mixed-bag family."

Enrique is realistic about his empathy for his dad: "He had a lot of abuse in his upbringing... extreme generational trauma. So I kind of give him a pass for that, but I don't really give him a pass... I give him a 20% pass and then 80% he was just a f***up."

Even Enrique's start to this world was traumatic...

A few years after his parents were married, Selva was in the hospital scheduled for an emergency hysterectomy when a nurse insisted they give her a pregnancy test. It was positive, yet the doctors wanted to continue with the procedure. Selva and one of the nurses fought to keep the baby, and that fateful child was of course Enrique.

Enrique is often diplomatic when he describes his life growing up, something he calls "a very tough childhood." They moved around a lot, living in various trailer parks, motels, staying with friends and family... But he fought his way through and made it to the other side.

"My dad would be fine for two or three months, then he'd get a paycheck and get drunk, disappearing for a month. I remember we had a brand-new LTD station wagon in 1979. We got it with a loan on my mom's credit. Well, he took it and sold it for drinking money, and then we went bankrupt. We ended up fleeing the country for nine months... By then, my uncle had been exiled, so we went and lived with my grandparents in Spain. My dad would threaten my mom, 'Oh well, if you don't do this or that, I'm going to get you deported and you're going to lose the kid.' So just really nasty... He wouldn't teach her how to drive, controlling things like that."

In comparison, Enrique has nothing but love and admiration for his mother. She was "a tough woman," who served as his rock, always supporting him and doing what she had to do to make it through... just like Enrique.

He remembers being six or seven years old when he and his mom tried to separate from Pepe. "We were homeless for a short time... We were staying at a motel and our money ran out, so we slept in our station wagon." He tells me she worked two or three jobs at a time, and he remembers her trying to kill herself once, but he says it with a shoulder shrug like, "S**t happens, ya know?"

As a kid raised in such trauma and hyperstimulation, constantly under stress, Enrique developed his own coping mechanism... a sense of structure within the chaos.

It began with his baseball card and comic book collections at age 13. He created a spreadsheet on his Atari computer (Excel premiered in 1985, but he didn't have it yet) and methodically categorized his comics. Accessing The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide from the local library, Enrique hand-calculated the price and grade data each month.

The structure of the numbers and the methodology of the math was a type of calm in the storm for Enrique... and a binary brainiac was born.

Enrique excelled in school, choosing the "fight" instead of "flight" response... He was the student body president and salutatorian his senior year. He founded the Phoenix chapter of Teen Age Republicans.

He recalls winning a stock-picking contest in his Economics class when he was 16. "The contest had a loophole that no one understood... Stock purchases were done using Wednesday's closing price. So I would either find companies that were involved in a merger after the close Wednesday, or reported great news after the close that Wednesday, or IPOs that were pricing Thursday morning. The Econ teacher didn't know all that much about stocks, and every week I won by a landslide..."

A big part of Enrique's motivation to excel in school and ultimately in his career was his tough home life: "Being poor sucks. Being on food stamps sucks. So I came up with a plan to not be poor." He settled on "Wall Street as a place that seems to make people rich."

He got accepted to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the top business school in the entire country. As Enrique puts it, Wharton "produces the best of the best professional athletes on Wall Street."

"There was a free Bloomberg machine and about 20 of us that used to linger around it... I didn't have any money of course... I didn't own any f***ing stocks. But we'd just sit around and bulls**t about stocks. By the way, those 20 guys have now probably managed like $100 billion through the years."

He stayed focused and excelled in college, too, graduating at the top of his class with a triple-finance major. After graduation, Sponsors for Education, a group that pairs minorities with Wall Street internships and jobs, placed Enrique at Lehman Brothers in the fixed-income division. ("A great program because guess what, Mexican kids from Phoenix don't have a lot of connections to get Wall Street jobs...")

He'd had a taste of the Wall Street life, and he liked it... and wanted more. After Lehman, he moved into hedge-fund investing and portfolio management, eventually launching his own successful hedge funds. His binary, math-orientated mind was a perfect fit for a money manager and stock picker...

Enrique touts that he has made money in every down market, a hard thing to accomplish. "I made money in '98. I made money in the melt down. I made money in the melt up too – not a lot of people can say both of those. I made money on September 11. I made money in the financial crisis. And I plan on making money out of the coronavirus fallout."

Enrique's first expensive splurge purchase speaks volumes about him... "I paid off my mom's debt, gave her a very generous chunk of change, and told her she never had to work again if she didn't want to."

We'll continue Enrique's incredible story in tomorrow's Masters Series essay.

Regards,

Laura Greaver

Editor's note: Enrique has already published seven recommendations in his brand-new Empire Elite Growth advisory that he believes offer at least 500% upside today. And he has even more moneymaking opportunities in the pipeline for the months ahead.

But if you don't act now, you could miss the best chance to get in on his ideas... Our friends at Empire are currently running a charter membership special, with his subscription cost slashed by more than half. Don't delay, though... This one-time-only offer is set to expire on Monday. Learn more here.