Building Wealth

How to Make 'Walking Around' Cash With Nintendo

Nintendo has surged more than 100% in the last two weeks on the hype around its Pokémon Go mobile game.

The Pokémon franchise got its start on the Nintendo Gameboy as a black-and-white handheld game that let you travel around a virtual world and collect small monsters.

The new Pokémon Go game is played on a smartphone and lets users wander around the real world, using the phone's camera to discover monsters and collect items at community landmarks and businesses.

Our Stansberry Research headquarters was even loaded into the game as a "Pokestop"... And sure enough, we've had a number of millennials standing outside, flicking at their phones.

The app is currently No. 1 in Apple's app store, and already has more active users than social networks Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Twitter – sending Nintendo shares surging. Last week, Nintendo set a record for the most shares ever traded in Japan.

But if you didn't own shares of Nintendo prior to the release of this blockbuster game, here's how to cash in...

If you didn't grow up playing video games, you may have a hard time believing this industry is a major and fast-growing sector of the U.S. economy. And Nintendo is one company that's enjoying a healthy portion of that growth.

Nintendo has produced some of the most influential video-game series of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid. It has also produced some of the best-selling video-game systems of all time, including the Nintendo Wii, the Nintendo DS, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, and the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

The American release of the NES in 1985 helped revive the video-game industry. A few years ago, IGN – an entertainment website – rated NES the greatest gaming console of all time. More than 700 games were created from 1985 to 1994 for this system.

Like most computer technologies, new video games are much more advanced than their 30-year-old counterparts. But many young adults who grew up playing video games have a strong sense of nostalgia for the older games (no different than the nostalgia most people feel for childhood toys of any kind).

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So a huge market exists for "retro" video games. Some gamers are willing to pay thousands of dollars for these vintage titles.

A game called Stadium Events by Bandai sells for about $40,000 new and about $1,000 used. Many other titles like The Cheetahmen, Hot Slots, and Caltron 6-in-1, sell for more than $500 used.

Even more common titles – like Snow Brothers, Bonk's Adventure, Menace Beach, and Megacom 76 – are worth more than $50 used. The public doesn't realize the value in some of these older games and will often discard these titles, donate them to Goodwill, or sell them at yard sales. (You may even have some in your basement from when your kids were young.)

One of my former colleagues made an average of $10,000 a year in extra income through buying and selling old Nintendo video games. He spent around five hours a week shopping for different titles online or at local thrift shops and then resold these games to collectors on the open market.

If you're interested in generating gains through trading NES games, I suggest you ONLY try to find these games at local garage and yard sales. Some thrift stores sell these games at higher prices due to increased popularity.

Just remember, no matter where you are, be on the lookout for these old Nintendo games. You never know when or where you can find one.

The pricing for these games varies widely, based on scarcity and original popularity. For a pricing guide of NES games, I recommend using the Price Charting website here.

I call this type of strategy, "Thrift Arbitrage"... It's a way you can invest directly in a company's most successful product lines without having to buy a stake in an entire business.

It requires no trading experience... You just need to do a little homework. And you only need to "invest" a little capital in each transaction. More important, it's fun to search and find profitable opportunities outside the stock market.

If you'd like to learn more, I've dedicated an entire chapter of my Big Book of Retirement Secrets to this strategy. You can order your copy here.

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