How to Predict the Future Today... With Tomorrow's Tech

As a child of the '80s, I always loved the opening scene of the classic film Back to the Future...

Marty McFly steps into Doc Brown's laboratory to find it crammed with dozens of clocks – all ticking away, measuring time with obsessive precision.

He's not just keeping time. He's studying it and plotting his attempts to bend it.

Ironically, Doc's cluttered lab is also stocked with a coffee maker that drips without a pot and a toaster that burns toast. There's even a janky robotic arm for feeding the dog.

It's a strange mix... evidence of careful calculation, paired with the follies of experimentation.

My house looks a lot like Doc's sometimes. But instead of semi-functioning kitchen appliances, it's filled with gadgets, beta software, and other devices that promise to change the world... but currently only sort of work.

And like Doc Brown, I'm not collecting these things for fun. This is the most reliable method I've found for spotting major investment opportunities.

You see, I'm a "try before I buy" kind of guy. I need to test-drive a device myself to see whether it will reshape our lives in the future.

So while most traditional analysts find trends in quarterly reports, I live with tomorrow's tech today – and that reveals which stocks will matter most.

Sometimes it does feel like I've accumulated some very expensive paperweights. But I'm not just gadget collecting. I'm building my own time machine, one early adoption at a time.

And with this strategy, you can find some lucrative opportunities...

The 'Specialty Hardware' Behind the AI Revolution

One example happened back in 2011. While launching my hedge fund, we hit a wall: our quantitative algorithms worked at a snail's pace on traditional central processing units ("CPUs").

A friend of mine who worked at Google suggested we try using graphics processing units ("GPUs"). Most people saw them as fancy graphics cards – essentially gaming toys.

But we invested in an Nvidia (NVDA)-powered workstation with a $2,000 graphics card... And it changed everything.

Suddenly, our machine-learning algorithms ran 50 times faster. Pattern recognition that once took hours now finished in minutes.

The constraint curve was obvious: CPUs were hitting their limits... while GPUs could handle thousands of calculations simultaneously.

At the time, Wall Street analysts still called Nvidia a gaming company. But I understood the infrastructure revolution happening underneath and urged family and friends to invest in the stock. Every computing breakthrough – from deep learning to cryptocurrency mining – would need these parallel processing monsters.

Since 2011, Nvidia has climbed more than 70,000%... Its current market cap is nearly $5 trillion.

Identifying that GPU investment in 2011 proved prophetic 10 years later, in 2021... when I paid Tesla (TSLA) $8,000 for its full self-driving software upgrade that didn't exist yet.

Friends called me crazy for paying thousands up front for "vaporware." That's what you call technology that has been announced but not released... a promise that might never pay off.

But the first time my Model Y navigated highway traffic autonomously – no hands, no feet – I once again saw the constraint curve breaking. Human reaction times and attention spans were becoming the real bottleneck in transportation. But this new technology could fix that problem.

Sure, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's timeline was optimistic (robotaxis were originally supposed to arrive in 2018). But the technology worked. And crucially, it ran on the same parallel processing architecture I'd discovered a decade earlier – Nvidia's GPUs powered the neural networks that interpreted road conditions in real time.

The irony wasn't lost on me: Those $2,000 graphics cards from 2011 were now the brains of a transportation revolution.

Where to Look for the Next Great Investment Cycle

My method is a lot like legendary investor Peter Lynch's mantra, "Invest in what you know"...

By walking through the mall, talking to your kids, and getting firsthand experience, you can find excellent investments.

So what am I experimenting with now?

I've written about wearables several times in the past, highlighting smart glasses and smart rings. But this time, my wife was ahead of me (which seems like a good sign).

Right now, on my finger, there's a tiny computer that's revolutionizing how I think about the future of technology... and where the next trillion-dollar opportunities are hiding.

The Oura Ring tracks my sleep, heart rate, body temperature, and dozens of other biometrics 24/7. But here's what's fascinating: This tiny device has no screen. It's just passively collecting data.

Our phones (and smart watches) are about to lose their monopoly as our data-collection and primary computing device. The future isn't one supercomputer in your pocket – it's dozens of tiny, specialized computers throughout your life.

This distributed intelligence shift is creating massive opportunities most investors haven't noticed yet. I'm talking about ultra-low-power AI chips... edge-computing networks... and privacy-preserving hardware that keeps your data local.

Doc Brown's lab wasn't just filled with clocks. It was filled with the right tools to see time differently.

That's what I do as an investor. And right now, my Oura Ring is ticking toward the next great tech investment cycle.

Good investing,

Josh Baylin

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