Market Visionary
Lunch Money gets the crystal ball rolling, with a glimpse into the future for Nortel, the TSE and inflation in 2002.

Financial Post - January 5, 2002 - By William Hanley

We've never met Deborah Levin or even seen her picture. But when we spot her at the entrance to Matisse, the restaurant in the Marriott Hotel at the edge of Toronto's tony midtown shopping district, she makes an impression. We know right away she's our Lunch Money companion.

No. We're not psychic. It's a matter of deduction. On the phone, she sounded like she'd be 30ish. She's where she's supposed to be at 1 p.m., she's looking around for her luncheon companion whom she's never met and, though she's not lugging around a crystal ball, she has a certain 1970s look that gives a hint of New Age mystic.

Levin is a psychic -- "a clairvoyant who has visions," as she describes herself. And she says that many of the people seeking her services are actually looking for answers that can be had through common sense.

Which brings us to the markets, where common sense can take investors a long way, but where a professional crystal ball gazer among the scores of amateur seers peddling their visions at this time of year is worth a look and a lunch, especially in light of the generally dismal forecasting record for 2001.

We got Deborah Levin's name out of the Yellow Pages. She was the first psychic we called, a random bit of fortune. Matisse, which we've frequented for years in a non-Lunch Money capacity, proves a happy medium distance for us both. Meantime, the food here, though firmly in expense account territory, is consistently first rate -- worthy of Matisse's palette and palate, if you will.

Levin starts with the vegetable salad with goat cheese and decides on the horseradish-encrusted Atlantic salmon for her main. We go for the crab cakes and then the lobster ravioli in a sauce with smoked salmon.

Levin, 34 and a professional psychic since 1994, is eager to get on with the business at hand before the food slows her down. She's bemused by all the end-of-year fuss about the future -- about 2002. "People should be concerned all the time," she declares.

To get the crystal ball rolling, we throw out some words and names that may have a bearing on the markets this year, keeping in mind that Levin has no special interest in or knowledge of matters financial beyond the fact that many of her clients are industry professionals:

- Alan Greenspan "is not going to help." It's as though the Federal Reserve chairman is "at a crossroads and he's run out of ideas." Meantime, he's going to be troubled with some sort of infection, the by-product of a medical procedure.

- "I do get something about a merger" with Nortel Networks -- even if Nortel may not like the idea. "The stock price can't improve unless they do something, right? They don't have a lot of options."

- It's safe to assume the Nasdaq composite index is "more or less going to be hovering where it is. If it's going to go up, it's going to go down. There's no huge gain here."

- "How come" the Toronto Stock Exchange "will do well? I like it for the first quarter."

- The word "gold" immediately conjures up a vision of another metal -- a dull "pewter-hued" metal that has connections with the East Coast and South America, which she likes as a special focus for the mining industry.

- Inflation will remain tame, with perhaps a slight increase in prices.

- The oil price is not going down. "If it does, it's not enough to make a huge change to the consumer."

- The Canadian dollar could rise by 2%, with April looking particularly good, but with a slump in the fall. "I see things seasonally."

- Bank mergers will be back on the table and Bank of Montreal stands to see a lot of action. Meantime, American Express Co. is somehow going to make its presence felt.

- Finance Minister Paul Martin is "tired and needs more than just a vacation. Could he retire?"

While these visions come tumbling out, Levin works steadily at her vegetable salad, displaying a healthy appetite that she'll need to maintain when confronted with her generous portion of salmon. Lunch Money, who should have known better, realizes that getting through the lobster ravioli will be difficult after the rich crab cakes.

If food slows down the clairvoyant in Levin, it's a comfort to us on a wintry afternoon when Levin allows as how she "sees" two things to do with terrorism -- and she doesn't think they represent the twin towers at the World Trade Center. "You should expect more terrorism," she says. It won't be in Canada, but she's especially concerned about France. And Chicago comes to mind. "Is there anything special going on there?"

Deborah Levin says she knew as a child she had something special. "From an early age I've always known things or seen things about people."

After opening a New Age bookstore on Toronto's trendy Queen Street West in the early 1990s, she confided to a friend she was a seer. People began visiting the store for impromptu, unpaid consultations. And, after she made an impact on a radio call-in show in 1993, she was on her way as a professional psychic.

Today she makes a modest living -- "enough to pay my bills" -- charging $105 an hour for a maximum of two personal hour-long sessions daily in the lounge of her home in fashionable Cabbagetown and $3 a minute for phone consultations with clients from around the globe. Describing her clairvoyage, she jokes she's gone from "cute to crazy to career."

Levin says: 'I'm not really in the psychic crowd," some of whom charge up to US$700 for phone consultations. "I'm not really comfortable with money."

Although she has some money in RRSPs and likes real estate, she professes to be a better spender than saver.

And she warns people considering what to do with their RRSP contributions this year to make up their minds before mid-February, which will bring some kind of "fluctuation." It will be better to make decisions before or after that.

If the picture that emerges from our informal luncheon consultation is not decisive about events this year, with uncertainty as always providing a tantalizing backdrop, we're inclined to consider Deborah Levin's observations with some interest.

As our fine lunch comes to an end, our guest having thoroughly enjoyed her meal, she throws in some personal psychic observations about Lunch Money and family. Having taken our watch -- she likes objects on which to focus -- she impresses us with a couple of observations she could not otherwise have possibly known -- bits of information known only to us and a couple of others.

And she doesn't pull any psychic punches, either, telling us we might not enjoy the best of health for five or six years. Yet our agreeable lunch doesn't quite come to an end on such a disagreeable note. Levin says a "generous gift" is coming Lunch Money's way -- and we should accept it.

We would -- will? -- accept it, of course. One must be accepting, especially when it comes to the unknowable, indefinable gifts of seers, psychics and clairvoyants.

We can't say we're believers. But we believe that Deborah Levin believes.