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Three weeks into the new year and already the stock market has been hit with plenty of headlines. Futures swung around wildly overnight when the U.S. and Iran traded missile strikes in Iraq鈥� and it鈥檚 happening again with a new virus out of China called the coronavirus. This is a good example of why you need more than just stocks in your portfolio. Days after hitting new highs, the S&P 500 is up just 2.7% for the year so far. But so is gold, which usually gets people鈥檚 interest in times of trouble. Meanwhile, bitcoin is up 20%. That鈥檚 better than gold did in all of 2019. And frankly, in the world of cryptocurrencies, that performance is nothing.

The stock market is hitting a new all-time high. Cryptocurrencies are breaking out. And we are only 17 days into the Roaring 2020s! The S&P 500 is up 3%, the Nasdaq surged 4.4%, and the Dow is closing in on 30,000 for the first time ever. Keep in mind the index closed above the 29,000 level for the first time on Wednesday. I talk about this great start to the year in my new MoneyLline podcast. I also discuss the similarities between today and the start of the 1990s, which is a good thing. The decade of the 1990s was one of the greatest in stock market history 鈥� the Nasdaq gained a blistering 794%.

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鈥檚 no big surprise, for those of us who鈥檝e 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鈥檚 annual return was nearly three times higher (at 85%), and that鈥檚 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鈥檝e 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鈥檚 the ultimate example of a situation that sends investors scrambling to hedge their portfolios. But even though S&P 500 futures plunged overnight 鈥� and stocks fell the next day 鈥� gold did鈥� practically nothing. The SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) are up only about 1.5% since while bitcoin is up 25.5%!

I鈥檝e 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 鈥� 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鈥檝e talked a lot in MoneyWire lately about the opportunity here. Now let鈥檚 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鈥檚 not just something that you鈥檇 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鈥檚 oil production and worldwide supply). Now oil futures are right back down again after tensions seem to have eased.

When you鈥檙e a trend investor, like me, the right stocks tend to reveal themselves. You鈥檙e not just putting your faith in one CEO or one company鈥檚 next-quarter earnings. You鈥檙e making a much bigger 鈥� and more profitable 鈥� 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鈥檚 what I鈥檝e learned: Most winning tech companies all do one thing. They provide a better way to gather, sort, and communicate data. Think of Google鈥檚 (GOOGL) famous search engine鈥� Intuit鈥檚 (INTU) TurboTax software鈥� or even Microsoft (MSFT) Excel.

The start of the new year is a fun, festive time. But then the confetti settles, and we鈥檙e left with the same challenges as we had a few days ago. For example鈥� 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鈥檝e also been saddled with ultra-low (even negative) interest rates. Aren鈥檛 you also sick of paying all sorts of hidden fees to price-gouging middlemen 鈥� just to live your life in peace? These are the problems that blockchain technology 鈥� and its best-known application: cryptocurrency 鈥� exists to solve.

Laszlo Hanyecz didn鈥檛 expect to make history when he ordered two large pizzas from Papa John鈥檚 in May of 2010. But he did. Hanyecz paid for his pizzas using bitcoin in what鈥檚 believed to the first transaction using the cryptocurrency to pay for a product. And鈥� this is almost painful to write鈥� 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 鈥� all without realizing that second pizza would one day cost him nearly $38 million. How could that be? It鈥檚 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.