Beat the Millennium Crash: How to Profit from the Coming Financial Crisis (New York Institute of Finance)

For Jake Bernstein, the millennium is bad news. The stock market will crash, panic will ensue, and today's paper millionaires will become tomorrow's paupers. In Beat the Millennium Crash, Bernstein, a noted futures trader whose previous books include The Compleat Day Trader and How the Futures Markets Work, sees a confluence of trends and patterns that will culminate in a dramatic stock market panic that could be triggered by problems associated with the Y2K bug.

At the heart of Bernstein's argument is the idea that interest rates determine the direction of the stock market and overall economic activity. He believes rates are approaching a 54-year bottom, and that "there is no reason to believe that the patterns in interest rates have changed or that the market has ceased to be cyclical." Rising rates will cripple the current bull market, and investments that are out of favor today, such as precious metals, will be one way to profit in this gloomy environment. While Bernstein doesn't think that we'll all turn into pumpkins at midnight on New Year's Eve, he does see the end to the current stock market party happening by 2004. Bernstein particularly likes gold as a hedge to this bearish scenario as well as a healthy amount of cash. No one likes a party pooper or a contrarian, but his advice just might profit those who listen. --Harry C. Edwards