2020 has been quite a year already. Marijuana stocks had one of their best days in 12 months after bullish headlines from Organigram (OGI) and Aphria (APHA). Tensions with Iran suddenly ramped up, and in the aftermath, bitcoin has actually turned out to be a better store of value than gold. That’s no big surprise, for those of us who’ve paid attention. For example, bitcoin was already the top asset of 2019. Even S&P 500 stocks, with their nice 29% gain, were left in the dust last year. Bitcoin’s annual return was nearly three times higher (at 85%), and that’s even after closing the year well off its highs. Other asset classes, like bonds, real estate, the U.S. dollar, and overseas stocks, fell even further short. I definitely expect this to continue through 2020.

Lately I’ve been telling anyone who will listen about the enormous gains that are possible by owning cryptocurrencies. But are cryptos also a better asset for your portfolio than, say, gold? That will sound like a wild claim to some people. And a few years ago, it might have been. But now, not so much. A big spike in the price of bitcoin occurred after the U.S. air strike in Baghdad that took out Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. It’s the ultimate example of a situation that sends investors scrambling to hedge their portfolios. But even though S&P 500 futures plunged overnight – and stocks fell the next day – gold did… practically nothing. The SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) are up only about 1.5% since while bitcoin is up 25.5%!

I’ve gone on record as saying that cryptocurrencies will be the best performing asset of 2020. If that sounds wild to you, consider that they already were the best performers of 2019 – even after their pullback in the second half. Bitcoin still closed up 113%... far more than the 29% gain we celebrated for the S&P 500 stocks. We’ve talked a lot in MoneyWire lately about the opportunity here. Now let’s talk about WHY the cryptocurrency market really does live up to the hype: Behind every cryptocurrency is some great software: the blockchain. And like every other great software, this one lets us live our lives more efficiently.

Even if you never took a class in economics, you can get pretty far in analyzing the global markets just by keeping the supply and demand equation in mind. The equation illustrates how prices fluctuate based on how much people are buying and selling. And it’s not just something that you’d see a professor draw on a chalkboard. It plays out in the markets every day. Look what happened to the price of oil this week. In the past week, crude oil futures shot up as Iran and the United States traded missile attacks in Iraq (threatening the country’s oil production and worldwide supply). Now oil futures are right back down again after tensions seem to have eased.

When you’re a trend investor, like me, the right stocks tend to reveal themselves. You’re not just putting your faith in one CEO or one company’s next-quarter earnings. You’re making a much bigger – and more profitable – investment in the revolutionary trends that shape our world. Very often, these trends start with a technology breakthrough. So investing this way tends to mean investing in something new and, possibly, alien. Or, at least, they sound that way. But here’s what I’ve learned: Most winning tech companies all do one thing. They provide a better way to gather, sort, and communicate data. Think of Google’s (GOOGL) famous search engine… Intuit’s (INTU) TurboTax software… or even Microsoft (MSFT) Excel.

The start of the new year is a fun, festive time. But then the confetti settles, and we’re left with the same challenges as we had a few days ago. For example… All around the world, people are sick and tired of their leaders debasing their currency. Case in point, the U.S. dollar today is worth roughly HALF what it was worth in 1990! Saving is becoming practically impossible, since we’ve also been saddled with ultra-low (even negative) interest rates. Aren’t you also sick of paying all sorts of hidden fees to price-gouging middlemen – just to live your life in peace? These are the problems that blockchain technology – and its best-known application: cryptocurrency – exists to solve.

Laszlo Hanyecz didn’t expect to make history when he ordered two large pizzas from Papa John’s in May of 2010. But he did. Hanyecz paid for his pizzas using bitcoin in what’s believed to the first transaction using the cryptocurrency to pay for a product. And… this is almost painful to write… he paid what would now be more than $75 million for the two pizzas. He ordered two because he liked to munch on leftover pizza the next day – all without realizing that second pizza would one day cost him nearly $38 million. How could that be? It’s pretty simple. Each bitcoin was worth about $0.003 at that point in time, so the 10,000 bitcoins he used to pay for the pizza were worth about $30.

If you pay any attention to the world of cryptocurrency, you’ve probably noticed that the market has produced some amazing winners over the past couple years. For instance, twice in bitcoin’s (BTC) history a preprogrammed event has taken place that caused its price to soar into the stratosphere. I explained what this event, known as “the halvening,” is all about in last Thursday’s MoneyWire. Basically, after bitcoin undergoes a halvening, the market receives half of the daily supply of new bitcoins. If demand holds up – and it will – prices rise. It’s simple supply and demand economics. In the months that followed the first halvening in November 2012, the bitcoin price rose 2,135%.

I regularly discuss different hypergrowth investing themes, and for good reason. My goal is to offer recommendations to my subscribers that have the chance to grow as much as 100-fold because of the massive, wealth-generating power of newfound industries or technologies that go on to change the world. Cryptocurrencies are in this category. If you’ve been tuning out this new asset class worth over $190 billion as of this writing, please don’t continue to do it this year. Not when so many catalysts are setting up behind bitcoin (BTC) and its altcoin cousins. It could leave you wondering what life-altering gains actually look like.

Back in November 2012, a change took place to the way bitcoin (BTC) rewards miners for creating new bitcoin and securing the network. We talked about this hugely significant event in yesterday’s MoneyWire. It’s called “the halvening” among industry insiders and happens every few years with bitcoin. It is written into the cryptocurrency’s “DNA” if you will – or its code base. Essentially, the supply of bitcoin dropped and the demand for it kept chugging along. In the months that followed, bitcoin’s price soared an amazing 2,135%, bringing a spectacular windfall to early investors who saw the halvening and its implications coming well ahead of time.