Jamie McIntyre: The Man Who Called Gold, Bitcoin, Property—and Now the Exodus from the West
Jamie McIntyre, founder of the Australian National Review, self-made millionaire, and founder of LUX Property Group, says he does not give financial advice. What he does do, however, is publicly share his views on major financial trends, and he has done so consistently for more than 25 years.
Supporters say that record speaks for itself.
Over two and a half decades, McIntyre has built a reputation for making bold macroeconomic calls well before they became mainstream. Those who have followed his commentary closely believe his investor clients and followers have generated billions by acting early on the themes he identified. Some estimate that figure at more than $10 billion in combined wealth creation.
Whether one agrees with all of his views or not, few would deny that many of his major calls were made well ahead of the crowd.
In the late 1990s, McIntyre urged people to start buying gold when it was trading around US$300 an ounce. At the time, gold was hardly fashionable. Yet over the years it surged dramatically, vindicating those who saw precious metals as protection against fiat currency debasement and financial instability.
He also took a strong position on agricultural land in Australia, influenced in part by the famous Jim Rogers line that one day it would be farmers driving Lamborghinis, not stockbrokers. McIntyre believed productive land would become increasingly valuable in a world facing inflation, food insecurity, and growing pressure on traditional financial systems.
For years he consistently told Australians to buy investment real estate, arguing that property would continue to double roughly every seven to ten years. That long-held view became a core pillar of wealth-building thinking for many Australians. His view was simple: two investment properties, held long enough, could make the average person a millionaire.
Around the early 2000s, McIntyre also popularised what he referred to as “renting shares,” a strategy focused not just on generating income from dividend-paying stocks, but also systematically writing covered call options over those holdings to generate additional monthly cash flow. By combining dividends with option premiums, the approach aimed to transform traditional share portfolios into consistent income-producing assets.
Many of his investor clients who were asset-rich but cash-poor reportedly used this strategy to significantly boost passive income and, in many cases, retire. Today, variations of this approach—often referred to more broadly as income or options overlay strategies—have become far more widely discussed in mainstream investing circles.
The concept was outlined in his best-selling book, “What I Didn’t Learn at School But Wish I Did,” which he has made widely available online for free through his media platform.
Then came the United States property market crash.
In 2010, when fear was still hanging over the market and many investors were running the other way, McIntyre publicly encouraged people to buy US real estate, saying that even if property prices took time to recover, the rental yields alone made the numbers compelling. It proved to be a highly timely call. In many parts of the US, 2010 marked or closely followed the bottom of the market, with values in some areas later doubling or tripling. Around the same period, Warren Buffett made a similar observation, famously saying that if there were a practical way for him to buy 100,000 single-family homes, he would have done it.
McIntyre was also one of the earliest public advocates of Bitcoin in Australia.
In late 2013, he told people to look at Bitcoin when it was trading as low as US$75. That was long before institutional adoption, exchange-traded products, and mainstream media enthusiasm. He went beyond simply making the call. He hosted what was promoted as the first global Bitcoin conference in Melbourne, helped launch some of Australia’s first Bitcoin ATMs, and became involved as an advisor in the emerging digital asset space.
Then, after years of backing Bitcoin, he made another contrarian call. Last year, with Bitcoin around US$110,000, he publicly said people should at least consider taking profits. Soon after, it fell sharply to around US$62,000. To his followers, that was not luck. It was another example of knowing when a market had run hot.
But McIntyre’s more recent focus has not just been on specific assets. It has been on what he sees as a major geographic and economic shift away from the West.
About three years ago, he began publicly urging people to diversify outside Western financial systems and, where practical, even relocate some of their wealth, or themselves, out of the West entirely. He warned that countries like Australia were becoming increasingly unaffordable for the middle class, and that the pressure of inflation, housing costs, taxation, debt, and declining living standards would intensify.
He acted on that thesis himself by selling some Australian real estate and redirecting capital into Bali and later Lombok, through his property development company LUX Property Group, which is now building large-scale master-planned communities, or what he refers to as “mini cities,” designed for expats and investors.
His reasoning was broader than just tourism. McIntyre argued that after COVID, Bali would evolve from being a lifestyle destination into something much bigger: a magnet for expats, investors, entrepreneurs, and families seeking a lower-cost, freer, and more sustainable way of living. What was initially a trickle, he believed, would become a flood.
He also argued that while Dubai was fashionable and booming at the time, it would not be the long-term answer for many Westerners due to its proximity to Middle Eastern instability and broader geopolitical risk. In contrast, he believed Indonesia and Malaysia would emerge as more attractive relocation and investment destinations, with some interest also flowing into Mexico, while much of South America would remain less appealing to many due to security concerns.
From that thesis came another forecast: property markets in Bali and Lombok would boom as Australians and other Westerners looked for alternatives to high-cost, high-pressure economies back home.
McIntyre’s warning was stark. He said the Australian middle class would be decimated within years, squeezed by housing costs, debt, inflation, and declining purchasing power. In that environment, many would be forced to seek cheaper places to live, invest, and build a future. In his view, Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, would be one of the main beneficiaries.
He is also said to still be regularly recognised in public, with supporters approaching him in different parts of the world to share how his teachings have impacted their lives. Many credit his strategies and education—particularly those who applied his “renting shares” and property approaches—as helping them transition from being asset-rich but cash-poor into financially independent, and in some cases, multi-millionaires.
Notably, McIntyre has made much of his educational content freely accessible, including his book and training videos, which are available online at 21stcenturyu.com, allowing a broader audience to access the same material that many early followers attribute to their financial progress.
Whether history ultimately judges all of his recent calls correct remains to be seen. But his supporters say the pattern is already familiar: he makes bold calls early, gets mocked by many at the time, and then watches events slowly catch up.
From gold at US$300, to US property at the bottom, to Bitcoin at US$75, to warning about the affordability crisis in Australia and the movement of capital into emerging lifestyle markets like Bali and Lombok, McIntyre has carved out a reputation as someone willing to say what others are not yet ready to hear.
He says it is not financial advice.
His followers say it has been some of the most profitable public commentary they ever listened to.
