When I was a kid, I had a friend named Corey. His folks were loaded: His dad was a successful gynecologist, and his mom “came from money,” as polite people used to say.

The family cars were all Mercedes-Benzes.  I was fortunate to have a relatively affluent upbringing, so luxury cars were not unknown to me. But one thing set Corey’s family’s cars apart: They had cell phones.

#-ad_banner-#During the 1980s in Wichita, Kan., cellular telephones were an exorbitantly expensive device limited mainly to very serious oilmen and very important physicians. But when I could finally afford it a decade later, during my sophomore year of college, I became an early adopter of the technology and bought a Nokia handheld model. It was expensive-ish, I suppose, but the convenience made sense to me, and it wasn’t like I had a mortgage to worry about.

Well, you know what happened. It wasn’t much longer before the cell phone trend caught on and then took off. The technology grew better and better, and so did the service, which simultaneously became cheaper and cheaper. Now, of course, no self-respecting college student — or street-corner bum — lacks a cell phone.

Think about how fast that happened.

In my memory, cell phones became ubiquitous in only a fraction of the time it took the nation to switch from rotary to digital phones. (Government data show that the TV was adopted even faster, though I wasn’t around for that.)

After the cell phone emerged, smartphones appeared and replaced cell phones even faster. Then we blinked and everyone bought a Kindle and a tablet. This continual process of technological adoption is called the diffusion of innovation.

You see, in 1962, Everett Rogers, a professor of rural sociology, published what pretty much is the standard theory of product adoption today. He said diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of a social system. 

Now, here’s where all this becomes important for investors… The speed at which this happens varies, Roger says, but the outcomes are scattered in a normal bell curve-shaped distribution of innovators, early adopters, late adopters and laggards. This has been exhaustively measured in everything from the flush toilet to the Internet and per-capita airline miles.

Let me be clear: any investor looking to make money from tomorrow’s game-changers needs to understand this concept.

This pattern of adoption is what led me to recommend Gogo (Nasdaq: GOGO), a company that provides in-flight Internet connectivity, to readers of my Game-Changing Stocks newsletter in mid-July. 

On June 21, the Wall Street Journal had published a dispatch claiming that the Federal Aviation Administration was expected to relax rules on in-flight use of personal electronics. And knowing that Gogo had long-term contracts with Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, US Airways and Alaska Airlines, I realized that this technology was in the early stages of rapid adoption, and Gogo was the main provider of these in-flight wifi services.

I recommended Gogo on July 15 at $14 per share, and by Dec. 4 the stock had reached a price of $34.34 — a 145% gain in less than 5 months. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 gained just 6.5%.

In Game-Changing Stocks, I recommend companies that I think are going to revolutionize their industry before their stocks have taken off. 

The ordinary media doesn’t cover this beat. They’ll tell you all about a discovery once it comes out — but they don’t look ahead to see where the next one is coming from. 

But I spend 60 hours a week poring over a multitude of newspapers and financial journals. My smartphone is crammed with CEOs, brokers, bankers and other heavy hitters, and I talk to them every day. Once I’ve collected a mountain of data from all these sources, I distil it into a single investment trend and present it in Game-Changing Stocks. 

The next game-changer is always just around the corner, and someone is going to profit from it. 

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ve released a new report called “The 5 Unstoppable Game-Changers To Get In On Now” which outlines several “game-changing” trends with the potential to revolutionize the way we live our lives — and make investors a killing in the months to come. In the past, my predictions have found stocks that returned 291%… 340%… even 390%. Just imagine how that could improve your overall portfolio’s returns. To learn more about this latest research going into 2014, follow this link.