This woman knows nothing about finance yet claims she can predict turmoil in the markets months before it happens. Don't believe her? Many blue-chip companies do – and pay handsomely for her 'intuition'.
By Helena de Bertodano / Source: The Telegraph
A few blocks from Wall Street lives a woman who is not in the least bit surprised at the recent economic upheaval on her doorstep. In fact, she predicted it years ago and is rather enjoying it.
'I love crisis,' says Laura Day, a psychic who advises major corporations on how to direct their business dealings. 'I love turning it around. I'm going to brag – in the last few weeks I've become a hero. My clients were all prepared for this. They were out of the market a year ago and now they're ringing me saying, "The whole world is freaking out and I'm just sitting here calm."'
The 49-year-old mother has earned more than $10 million in the past 15 years advising corporations and individuals including Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston and Rosanna Arquette. Day's otherwordly expertise doesn't simply encompass the financial; Arquette credits her with saving her daughter's life by sensing a potentially fatal medical condition.
While there is nothing very surprising about the Hollywood A-list embracing the help of a psychic, it is harder to imagine mainstream businesses enlisting her services. She takes on five businesses at a time, each of which pays her $10,000 a month for 24-hour access to her. She will not name her clients, although some have gone on the record extolling her work. Gabriel Lawson, the executive director of the American technology giant Seagate, hired her two years ago as a consultant and told Newsweek, 'She was amazing. Anybody who can afford her will get 100 times their money's worth.'
'In early July, right before the oil market dived, I said, "I wouldn't be buying oil futures now," and I predicted China's current troubles eight months ago,' Day says. Thanks to those and many other good calls, a prospective client can be on Day's waiting-list for years.
Not that she swans into board meetings wearing a gypsy dress and bejewelled headscarf. Quite the opposite. 'When I visit a company I make an effort to learn what their rules are,' she says. 'I don't want to look like a freak so I go in wearing a blue suit, I take my notes and I only say something when I know it will sound appropriate. If the CEO hires me, I go in as a consultant. Most of the time the rest of the company doesn't have a single idea of what I really do.'
So what does she really do? 'What I do actually works best if I know nothing, so I don't look at the market,' Day says. 'I'm a complete information desert. I just get a sense of the right thing to do. I'll say, "I understand that you're buying everything in China, but gosh I would hold off," and then they figure out why. Or a medical research client will come and say, "We're having trouble with the poly-whatever morph unit." My intuition will target exactly what their issue is and I'll say, "The seamed area needs something else to stick it together," and they will know they need a different polymer. Or whatever. I let the words come out of my mouth even though I may have no idea what I am talking about; my client will know what to do.'
Does she believe she is channelling spirits? 'I do not have an "in" with spirits,' Day offers. 'That's a scary concept. I don't want to be Guru Maharaja Day.' Indeed, she prefers to be known as an intuitive.
'I hate the word psychic,' she says, through gritted teeth as she settles into her sofa and tucks her feet underneath her. 'Because it means tea leaves and crystal balls and a six-floor walk up to a place that smells like cat's piss.'
Day does indeed live on the sixth floor, but there is a lift up to her flat. And she does have a cat, as well as white pigeons and fish, but her flat smells of freshly brewed coffee. No tea leaves either. 'I do not do tea, particularly not for English people because they're always so snotty and critical of the way I make it.' The flat is eccentrically furnished, but the nearest thing to a crystal ball is the disco mirror-ball hanging in the room where her 16-year-old son, Samson, plays his drums. She lives with Samson and her long-term boyfriend, Adam Robinson, and says the flat is divided into 'girl zone' and 'boy zone'. We are in the girl zone, which incorporates the sitting-room with its brightly coloured armchairs, countless plants, coloured-glass candle-holders and, bizarrely, a table of rubber ducks.
Leading off the sitting-room is her bedroom with a bed covered in a lime-green bedspread and dotted with stuffed animals. Her bathroom, which has no door, is so crammed with lotions and bags and clothes that you can no longer see the walls. It seems safe to say that her style is anti-minimalist.
Hanging in the sitting-room, opposite the black and white photos of Demi Moore embracing Day, is a card that reads, 'Laura, because of you I see the world anew. I celebrate the day you were born. Much love, Jennifer.' I imagine this is from Jennifer Aniston, who, along with Moore, threw a surprise party for Day last year. 'They tricked me and told me they needed me and I should come out to LA. Jennifer had my hair done, Demi had my make-up done. It was a group effort just to get me to a party where I had to be the centre of attention.'
Usually she prefers to be in the background. 'I'm an introvert,' she says, 'and a neurotic worrier.' Blonde and pretty, Day is easy company, although prone to off-kilter statements: 'Is it hot in here or is it just my perimenopause?' she asks at one point.
She wears little make-up and no nail varnish, which is unusual in New York. 'I don't like to put on lipstick and a bra that makes your boobs look like they don't hang to your waist.'
Day believes that her troubled childhood, growing up in New York, helped her develop her psychic abilities. 'I had a suicidal mother and I needed to learn to call the police in time to save her.' When Day was 12 years old her mother fell into a coma from which she was not expected to recover. Day 'knew' she would survive. 'I could see exactly what was going on in her body.'
Nevertheless, three years later, her mother finally succeeded in killing herself.
Her career as a psychic began in her early thirties, shortly after her marriage ended ('I knew when I was walking down the aisle that I would get a divorce') and she found herself in straitened circumstances. She had been casually advising a friend, a hedge-fund manager, on stock investments and asked if he would mind paying for her tips. He obliged and a career was born. Now she gives seminars on how to use the sixth sense and has written five books teaching people how to harness their own 'practical intuition'. 'Anyone can do what I do,' she says. 'It is an idiot's gift.'
Day knows that some people scoff at what she does, but doesn't care.
'The nice thing about growing up in a household where the police come and knock down doors to take your mother to hospital is that you really don't worry about what other people think.'
She comes from three generations of doctors, and her father, David Globus, has little truck with his daughter's line of work. Does she ever discuss her abilities with him? 'Are you kidding? My father just got convinced vitamins are useful.' Nevertheless, he has been known to ring her for help. 'He'll call me up at seven in the morning and say, "Where are my damned keys?" I'll say, "They're in the maid's bathroom in your grey jacket." We don't talk about how I know it; it would disturb him too much. It's the same with my son. He'll ask me things that don't register as weird, like, "I lost my backpack at school, can you tell me where it is?"'
I t must be very alarming to see what is happening in her own future. Does she foresee health problems or know how long she will live? 'I get a sense of that, but everybody does. I repress less than most people, but the truth is you never read well in your areas of neurotic preoccupation. When you're reading for yourself, your wishes and fears get in the way. I find when my intuition needs to tell me something it wakes me up from a dead sleep.'
Sometimes, she says, she finds her intuition predicting something that she does not want to hear about. 'When that happens I just put my hands over my ears and go, "No, no, no, no."'
Day tells me that she can see into a person, even someone she has never met before. 'I know them before they walk in the door.' Somewhat nervously, I ask her what she intuits about me. 'I don't do it in interviews. If you come over another time and give me a glass of wine – because I'm a cheap drunk – you won't be able to get away from me doing it.'
I ask her if she had anticipated that the current financial crisis would be as big as this. 'I thought it would be bigger, actually, and I think it's not over yet. These symptoms were cooking for years. I could feel this six years ago.' She thinks it will be decades before the market truly recovers. 'I wouldn't expect to sell my apartment for the same price I could have sold it for a year ago – not until my grandchildren sell it.'
She says that she never underestimates the 'weirdness' of her profession. When I suggest to her that it has gained in credibility over the past 20 years, she shoots back. 'Well, so has S&M, but people still don't talk about it.'
But what makes Day so much more engaging and less odd than one might think is that she happily admits her fallibility. 'I screw up all the time. My intuition is rarely wrong, but sometimes I interpret it wrong. Recently, a dear friend lost her job and was in a panic. I told her I saw her getting her job back [the following] Tuesday. She didn't get her job back, but her mother died on Tuesday and left her a lot of money. What I had been looking at was not her job, but whether she was going to have money to pay her bills. So I screwed up.'
She shrugs. 'As I always say, if I were God I would be paid more.'
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