'Intuitionist' Laura Day predicted the credit crunch - now big business is paying her big bucks
Thursday, 3 July 2008
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In China, skyscrapers are designed to conform to the principles of feng shui. In India, companies spend millions on new offices that sit empty for months while the chief executive waits for the local hindu priest to anoint them. But who'd have thought that the strictly secular swarmis of Wall Street would employ a psychic to direct their business dealings?
Laura Day (right) is the leading light of a new business breed dubbed "intuitionists". Day, a 49-year-old New York mother with no business training, says she has earned $10m (£5m) advising everyone from hedge fund managers to Hollywood movie stars. Her psychic hunches have influenced billion-dollar business deals and changed some of the most cynical minds in America, among them lawyers and film producers. Her clients are lauding her abilities – and paying $10,000 a month to employ them.
Day comes from three generations of physicians and, during her twenties, took part in research studies into the power of the human mind. "I came to intuition from science," she explains, "not from spirituality. I describe myself as an intuitive. Basically, I'm a psychic, but if I use that word my father has a fit. I'm a futurist, and I use techniques that some people don't believe in to predict markets, or to view competition."
When a hedge fund manager friend first started paying for her stock tips in the early 1990s, Day admits her business knowledge was negligible. "I couldn't even balance my credit card," she says, yet her instincts were impeccable. Soon her personal finances were less of a problem. "Intuition," she argues, "works best in the absence of information.
"I can train 100 people off the street to do what I do in an hour. It's a simple human ability and anyone who's successful is already using it effectively. The reason to train it is so that in the difficult times, when you have a bad trading month, for example, you can find a way back to hitting your targets."
Day advises a select group of clients, holds workshops for companies and individuals, and has a successful publishing career. But she's not the only unorthodox business guru on the block. Henry Weingarten, the head of the Astrologers Fund, a New York firm that advises businesses on the basis of planetary movements, forecast a major economic downturn in March 2007, when the Dow Jones was riding high. His clients will have thanked him when the crunch came.
Deirdre Morgan, an American psychic, arrived in London in 2004 to advise City bankers. The top echelon, she claimed, used her for "everything from individual consultations to structuring teams for merger deals. I help [people] redirect their energies and recognise their strengths."
Day says her predictions are "right far more often than they're wrong", which is why her existing clients are satisfied and she rarely has an opportunity to take on new ones.
Happily, Day is not too busy to provide free advice to Independent readers on riding out the credit crunch: "We've ridden out many of these crunches before; I'm old enough to have seen at least two," she says. "My biggest piece of advice is not to look too far ahead, but to take care of the moment. Use your intuition and your senses to respond to what's going on. [Predictions for] the future are so often wrong, but you can deal with what's right in front of you. People make the mistake of not dealing with what they're capable of doing – cutting costs, reducing debt, finding alternate sources of income. That applies to companies and individuals."
The technology giant Seagate uses her to train its management staff. The world-renowned William Morris talent agency consults her on who to represent. According to the US magazine Newsweek, a top New York lawyer has her select juries and anticipate their opponents' cases. And a major Hollywood producer took her advice and passed on a hot script, which later bombed at the box office.
Actor Demi Moore was persuaded to write the introduction to Day's first book, Practical Intuition, published in 1997. Moore claims that the psychic predicted her acting career's late bloom.
You might think that the credit crunch would make business people more willing to try new approaches, bringing more business the psychics' way, but Day says she's lucky to have a loyal client list: "In an economic downturn, mainstream companies are actually less likely to spend their money or risk a loss of face by using someone like me, whereas when the economy is doing well, there's more openness to trying new things that could be perceived as somewhat risky. If someone at a dinner party asks me what I do, I say I'm a writer. I never underestimate the weirdness of my profession."
