Market Crashes Birth Opportunities—If You Don’t Run Like a Fool
July 18, 2025
Most people think the news is about the truth. It’s not. It’s about timing. The media isn’t trying to inform you—they’re trying to control you. Eight corporations own over 90% of what you read, watch, and listen to. The moment you understand that, the market starts looking less like chaos and more like a scripted theatre.
They’ve mastered the formula: identify a threat (real or manufactured), saturate the airwaves with emotionally charged headlines, and push the herd into binary thinking. Black-and-white framing. Doom or boom. Apocalypse or euphoria. And while the crowd is stuck refreshing Twitter for updates on the next “outbreak,” “insurrection,” or “economic shock,” smart money is front-running the reversal.
The Covid playbook was textbook. Step one: viral threat. Step two: fear explosion. Step three: lockdowns and uncertainty. Step four: coordinated central bank intervention. Step five: asset price moonshot. Anyone paying attention wasn’t surprised. They were already long.
What’s the next fear catalyst? Doesn’t matter. War, pestilence, rate hikes, AI turning evil, UFOs—you name it. The market doesn’t need facts. It needs fuel. And fear is the cleanest-burning fuel there is.
Crisis Is the Setup, Not the Risk
This is the game: the retail crowd is emotionally reactive, and the market exploits that fact relentlessly. Panic equals liquidity—because someone’s always on the other side of that desperate sell.
When the VIX spikes above 30, most retail traders go to cash. But the real killers? They start scaling in. Why? Because volatility is opportunity disguised as chaos. It’s where the asymmetry lies.
Take March 2020. The VIX hit 82. That was your signal. While CNBC was airing death tickers, insiders were buying. Boeing fell to $89. In a matter of months, it more than doubled. Even the trashiest cruise stocks like Carnival surged over 150%. It wasn’t about value. It was about liquidity vacuums snapping back.
2022 Tech Meltdown? Another setup. Meta lost over 70% of its value. So did Nvidia. Zoom fell 88%. And now? Nvidia’s ripping past $1,200. Meta’s printing cash. The sheep sold the lows. The sharks bought them.
What’s coming next will look different, but the blueprint is the same: spike fear, drain weak hands, and hand over the goods to those who waited.
History Screams in Echoes: Listen or Be Left Behind
Go back a hundred years. The same patterns repeat. Not similar. Identical.
- 1929 Crash → 1932 Bottom: Dow Jones lost 89%. But if you’d bought when the blood was thickest, you caught a 300% rebound over the next few years—even during the Great Depression.
- 1974 Oil Crisis → 1982: Stagflation, war threats, inflation insanity. Sound familiar? That eight-year nightmare ended with a 20-year bull market that created millionaires out of nobodies.
- 1987 Black Monday: 22% down in a day. Panic. Margin calls. Suicides. Six months later? Back to breakeven. Two years? +60%.
- 2008 Lehman Collapse: Total system failure. A generational bottom. S&P at 666. Four years later, it had doubled. By 2020, it had quadrupled.
This isn’t optimism. This is math. The market rewards suffering—but only if you suffer with conviction.
The Fed Is the Dealer. You’re Either Aligned or Roadkill
Forget inflation targets and labour dual mandates. The Fed’s real job is to keep the debt Ponzi afloat. That means one thing: asset prices can’t be allowed to collapse. Ever.
And when they do? Out come the tools.
- 2020: Unlimited QE. Rates slashed to zero—$ 5+ trillion in stimulus.
- 2022: Hawkish pivot. Temporary pain. But when liquidity dried up? QT paused. Rates “paused.” Balance sheet “managing.”
The Fed doesn’t tighten forever. They scare. They signal. However, they always return to their core function: providing a monetary backstop. Because if asset prices collapse, so do the tax base, pensions, corporate buybacks, and real estate bubbles. That’s not a recession—that’s regime collapse.
And they won’t allow that.
False Narratives, Real Wealth Transfers
Let’s talk narratives—because that’s the battlefield.
- “AI will destroy jobs” → Hysteria masked the fact that the biggest wealth creation in tech since the dot-com boom is happening right now.
- “Interest rates will kill the economy” → Yet banks, housing, and discretionary retail all found their footing. The consumer didn’t collapse. They rotated.
- “Dollar death spiral” → Still the world’s reserve currency. Still, the deepest bond market. Tether may rise, BRICS may bark, but the dollar still rules.
- “Commercial real estate collapse” → Yeah, downtowns are toast. But industrial REITs, data centres, and logistics hubs? Exploding.
You don’t need to believe the narrative. You need to front-run its collapse.
Media Says Collapse, Insiders Say Buy
This part is often overlooked—but it shouldn’t be. Insiders have been accumulating, while retail flows have been shrinking.
Look at Form 4 filings. In June and July 2025:
- Over 300 S&P 500 insiders bought stock during market pullbacks.
- Buyback authorisations hit $400 billion YTD, despite recession fears.
- BlackRock and Vanguard added aggressively to core tech and energy holdings—right when media screamed stagflation.
Translation: They’re loading the gun while you’re checking Twitter for market crash hashtags.
Real Strategy: Wait for the Crack, Then Strike Like a Bastard
Tactical investing isn’t about being bullish or bearish—it’s about being ruthless with timing. You wait. You track sentiment. You map momentum shifts. You build dry powder. And then—when the crowd pukes—you attack.
Most investors are out there trying to pick tops and bottoms. Tactical investors wait for capitulation. They don’t just buy the dip. They buy the despair.
That means watching insider activity. It means scanning technical washouts. It means knowing when sentiment flips from uncertainty to hopelessness.
Because that’s where the edge is. Not in predicting GDP. Not in watching Powell’s facial ticks. But in spotting that moment when the herd breaks.
Final Signal: This Isn’t the End. It’s the Set-Up for the Next Supercycle
Let’s be blunt. We are on the edge of something massive—not a crash, but a setup. The AI wave hasn’t even hit its second act. Energy is underinvested. Defence budgets are surging. Biotech is ripe. Commodities are coiling. And the Fed will eventually pivot.
This is the eye of the storm.
The real wealth is built right here. Not during calm. Not during confirmation. But during doubt.
It’s not about being first. It’s about being ready. The world’s not ending. But your chance to own the next cycle before it explodes? That window is closing.
Tactical Investor Playbook:
- Scan sentiment indicators (AAII, put-call ratios, VIX spikes).
- Watch insider buying and Form 4 activity.
- Track technical washouts—weekly RSI below 30, volume capitulation.
- Ignore media panic unless it aligns with mass psychology extremes.
- Position into structurally strong sectors with high contrarian signals.
- Attack when everyone else is retreating.
Mass Psychology: How Panic Births Opportunity
When markets crash, logic rarely leads. Emotion does. Panic. Herds stampeding to the exits. The wreckage looks final, but underneath that chaos is something deeply consistent: a cycle of fear that always overplays its hand.
The Dutch Tulip Mania (1630s) didn’t just implode on tulips—it collapsed on the mass illusion of infinite ascent. Same with the South Sea Bubble in 1720. British investors thought they’d found the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. Newton famously rode the bubble up, sold for a profit, re-entered as greed consumed him, and then lost his fortune. The pattern was never about the underlying company—it was always about sentiment.
Fast forward to 1907: The Panic of 1907, following the collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust, sent the Dow plunging over 50%. But it also led to J.P. Morgan stepping in as an unofficial central bank, restoring calm and setting the stage for a recovery. Smart money didn’t just endure the crash—they used the crowd’s fear as fuel.
In 1929, as the Great Depression triggered an 89% drawdown in the Dow, names like Jesse Livermore didn’t just survive—they thrived by reading crowd signals and shorting the mania. But more crucially, by 1932–1933, when breadlines formed and spirits were crushed, a new wave of tactical buyers entered. The Dow soared nearly 100% from the 1932 low, in one of the most psychologically inverted rallies in history. When the masses were paralysed, the contrarians acted.
The same story played out in 1974, following the collapse of the Nifty Fifty and the oil shock. Sentiment was radioactive. Institutions dumped quality stocks like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Disney at laughable multiples. But those who leaned into the panic—Warren Buffett among them—locked in decade-long outperformance.
Every crash contains a script. Fear builds fast, peaks irrationally, and blinds the herd. If you’re watching sentiment data, volatility spikes, put/call ratios, and media tone, you can feel when fear has hit maximum velocity. That’s not the time to flee—it’s often the moment to strike.
Technical Analysis: The Signal Beneath the Rubble
While fear surges in the headlines, technical analysis whispers truths on the tape. It doesn’t argue with the story—it tracks the action.
After Black Monday in 1987, when the Dow dropped 22% in a single day, the media declared financial Armageddon. But technical setups told a different story. Breadth indicators, such as the McClellan Oscillator, flashed deep capitulation. The 200-day moving average was violently pierced, only to hold. Within two years, the market not only recovered but also hit new highs.
In 2008, the Lehman collapse cratered global equities. However, by March 2009, price action began to diverge from sentiment. RSI readings hit extreme oversold. Volume began surging on up days, not down. MACD turned positive on weekly charts. The crowd was still vomiting shares, but the smart charts started flashing green. That month marked the bottom.
The same playbook unfolded in March 2020. COVID hit. The S&P plummeted 35% in a matter of weeks. The VIX hit 85—an extinction-level reading. CNN’s Fear & Greed Index bottomed at 2/100. However, technicals spotted it first: a bullish divergence on the RSI, massive volume on bounce attempts, and a cascade of failed new lows. That low became one of the most explosive rallies in history, with the Nasdaq doubling in 18 months.
Even further back: the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble. While sentiment collapsed and prices imploded, a handful of speculators noticed consistent accumulation patterns—steady volume into quality names decoupled from the bubble’s speculative core. The concept of “technical patterns” didn’t exist back then, but the behaviour was the same. Some stocks stopped making new lows while others fell apart. That was the earliest whisper of rotation—of crowd psychology shifting beneath the surface.
Technical tools—such as Bollinger Bandwidth, breadth thrust indicators, RSI, and moving average crossovers—are not magic. But in moments of chaos, they provide structure when emotion is the only other option.
When aligned with mass psychology—when sentiment is in full meltdown but price action shows resilience—that’s your cue. Not to run, but to reload.
