Navigating Murky Markets: How to Think Ahead When Uncertainty Strikes

Crypto winter or just a storm? Markets don't wait for clarity—here's how to stay sharp when the charts turn chaotic.

Cut Through the Noise

When BTC wobbles and altcoins mimic drunk sailors, fundamentals become your lighthouse. Forget chasing pumps—real gains come from cold, hard analysis.

The Institutional Playbook

Watch the whales. While retail panics, BlackRock and Fidelity are building positions—their moves telegraph the next macro cycle.

Liquidity ≠ Wisdom

A 10% green candle doesn't mean 'all clear.' Remember 2022? Exactly. Treat rallies like a bank lobbyist treats regulations—with extreme skepticism.

Markets reward the prepared. Stay greedy when others are delusional.

Fish-brained investors

Jeff Bezos is a famously long-term thinker, but he sometimes cautioned against it.

“If you are planning for more than twenty minutes ahead in this kind of environment,” he warned during the dotcom boom, “you are wasting your time.” 

At the time, the internet was evolving so rapidly that he thought it was dangerous to base a business model or an investment on any long-term assumptions.

Now, thanks to the unprecedented advance of AI, things seem even murkier — for businesses executives and investors, especially.

Will stocks and/or companies even be necessary a few years from now? 

Will people even be necessary? 

Technology has allowed us to see ever deeper into the universe, but it’s impeding our ability to see into the future.

One thing that does seem certain, however, is that AI will disrupt many businesses over the next few years.

A few obvious victims (like newsletter writing) aside, it’s unfortunately impossible to say which. 

Microsoft, for example, might be a huge winner if everyone is soon using its co-pilot to write code and make powerpoints.

Or it could be a huge loser if AI eliminates WHITE collar employment (and therefore the need to write code and make powerpoints).

I can’t imagine there’s ever been a time when potential investing outcomes have been as binary as that. 

The world’s largest registered investment advisor, Ric Edelman, thinks this is a reason to own fewer equities (being businesses of the past) and more crypto (being a technology of the future).

But his recommendations require a perhaps unrealistically clearsighted view of the future.

He recommends bitcoin, the appeal of which is largely based on its resistance to change — and Ethereum, which evolves in meticulously thought-out five-year plans.

Conspicuous by its absence from his recommendations is Solana, which does the opposite, aiming to iterate quickly, like a fish.

That has been an advantage in the current environment where crypto’s most active users don’t seem to care about anything other than the speed and cost of execution. 

But this too could change. 

Tomorrow’s users may put more value on censorship resistance and decentralization (however defined), in which case, crypto activity might migrate back to the slower-moving Bitcoin and ethereum ecosystems.  

I’m guessing there’s probably a happy medium between the two approaches.

Jeff Bezos, for example, concentrated Amazon’s resources on things that he could observe now and was certain WOULD persist: Customers would always want lower prices and faster delivery, he reasoned. 

In planning for the future, then, he argued that the most important question to ask is: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?”

Seems like good advice just now.

Be it crypto, equities or anything else, fish-brained investors and builders should probably focus on the things directly in front of them — and which of those are unlikely to change.

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