My brother contacted me about his concerns about a market crash, and how to navigate one. The following is my response with some datapoints attached. I have blanked out some of the names my brother and I own.
I don’t have a crystal ball and really don’t advise people in general or even friends or relatives anymore especially since my folks passed away. And there is no way that I am turning WW into an investment/speculation rag. If you ask me for specific plays I won’t answer. And we have already discussed the insider manipulation and getting the memo edge gaming and algos.
So feel free to accept or reject this, no skin off my back. My conviction is relatively high but not certain. It is simply food for thought. But there may be some elements of use.
Brother-
Did you read read my post from this weekend? Important read.
Because of this Ai bubble pile in nobody really owns miners or juniors- it is not a crowded trade.
One thing that’s going to be liquidated hard: AAPL imagine trading at a 40pe when no one buys the $2000 plus new iPhone 18s and it’s historical avg per in good times is 17pe
— Emily and Me (@EmilyandMe2) September 28, 2026
There is unlikely to be a “panic” in ******, et al, in fact money will try to bid on them, and these trade thin. If anything randomly slips BUY THEM. I have plenty of cash for that, but I am not selling anything now in that sector.
Explorers provide alpha via discoveries. The ones I use raised capital for this early in 26 when prices in the sector were higher. Results are coming out continually.
Gold will be a haven the instant all this nonsense and posing for the algos about rate hikes disappears. The credit collapse will hasten the USD rout and flight to new safe havens. Selection is still important.
I know you think that is physical silver and rolls of nickels, but those have real liquidity problems when the shops you try to trade with close down. Your other option is ****** Bank? My biggest personal concern are my holdings of short term US Treasury bills and dollar and Euro debasement, not *****, ~~~~, ##### and +++++.<
Property? There are a trillion dollars of commercial real estate loans maturing in the next six months. Institutions holding the properties will have to unwind this. Equity investors in the weakest office and mall assets have in many cases already been wiped out, leaving the remaining pain with the debt holders. So once again we lead back to another credit crisis and not just in Ai and sovereign debt.
The major miners are more flush with cash and debt free than ever. They are extremely profitable and not expensive stocks.
There are liberal capex tax laws being implemented in Canada and the US for mine development, full write off during spend. This favors producers in tandem with new development projects.
Something not being talked about enough: the new mega-deduction tax policy. Just met with a $22 BN oil producer…their expected tax savings = ~7% of our modelled ’27 cashflow (at $70WTI). Hearing even bigger numbers for others. pic.twitter.com/vVbEkD2IbR
— Eric Nuttall (@ericnuttall) September 17, 2026
The permitting regime is being loosened. I have largely focused on Canadian and US names, little in emerging markets. Canadian resources in general will be another haven.
My experience with trusting employers and even brothers has been problematic: see https://ca-civ393104.org/ for the tedious details, lol
Plan B, for those of us not invested in the marketplace:
Perimeter
Garden
Chickens
Rice & beans
Solar
Communications
Bullets
Spares
Coinage
It’s not that I disagree with you, Russ, it’s that I don’t trust the management of most companies enough to want to invest in them
I figure the real money is in STARTING and OWNING a company, not being an employee or a stockholder. Sole proprietorships seem to offer the best return, but partnerships let you take some time off (hoping and praying that everything will still be there when you return).
Also, there seems to be enormous potential for corruption in small business – you almost need to know the owners and operators before you can feel comfortable investing in them, but you never really know where your money is going.
I have concluded that if one cannot start a company, that one’s money is best spent by investing in oneself, one’s knowledge, education, and tools. Saving dollars is crazy, the purchasing power just leaks out as the dollars sit in the deposit. My definition of value does not involve dollars.
Saving up big piles of money is mostly important if you need to defend yourself against some asshole with a big pile of money. We need to address that. Assholes with too much money are the problem. They are distorting the economy. By now everyone can see this but it was not always so obvious.
If we want the economy to work we need to get rid of the assholes. And maybe the money.
I would like to see the return of the original “stock market” – people bringing their eggs, and their chickens, and their fruits and vegetables and other wares to a weekend market and buying, selling, or bartering, as they see fit – no futures, no abstractions, no information blackouts, no non-disclosure agreements, no lawyers – in fact, no government, if possible, other than stall placement and some boundaries to keep everything civilized.
I see the government bending over backwards to please THE stock market and betraying the population who create all the real value that THE stock market drools over. I would like to see roles reversed.
We need to impose some limits to growth. Otherwise we face the genuine risk of living in a cancerous civil society where growth is the only imperative.
Thomas Jefferson, on a related topic:
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”
My modern translation:
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without the Internet, or the Internet without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
It’s time for a change!
My $0.02, YMMV, etc
Solid counsel for younger more flexible people. Difficult for old static boomer types with wealth. Especially true in environments and foreign lands with bureaucracies. I personally have spent a lifetime in financial markets with some success. Hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
Hopefully everyone subscribes to Martin Armstrong’s free blog
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/
‘Socrates’ is impartial!
The first 30 min. deals (in technical jargon) that the commodities markets “do not represent reality”. In addition to the factors listed above by Russ, Currie describes a house of cards with each threat to global stability contributing a major crisis all at the same time.
ENERGY MARKETS AT BREAKING POINT, TRUMP MAY DESPERATELY BAN DIESEL EXPORTS – w/ Jeffrey Currie
youtube.com/watch?v=l-VeX8rOZ-g
oh, and then throw in: AI, Nuclear War, Super El Nino, the Yen / Bond crisis, and all the lines in my forehead… oi
Tangible Outcomes says CNBC of drumph xi summit. Yeah, outcomes the tangibles into China’s hoard.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/28/trump-xi-summit-tangible-outcomes-us-china-truce.html
Being middle aged, and spending all of life without hardly two coins to rub together left me without any assets in this shithouse world. As you could expect, higher education was difficult to obtain without extreme debt (something to which I wasn’t going to subject myself to). What I was able to receive, upon graduating I was faced with a job market post-crash of 2008. Magically then, just to get an entry IT job, one had to pull X number of years out of your ass (probably an excuse to hire HB1 folks) to get employed. This led to many years of hopelessness and despair. I concluded long ago that the universe hated me. So, every election I write in “Giant Asteroid” as my preferred candidate for elected office, bar none. This is my middle finger to a rigged system.
I did pick up a bit of auto repair skills back in my youth, that skill set will come in handy along with a library on books in survival lit (E-books and PDFs make no sense if there is no grid to power computers or tablets). I have been spending my time these past few years researching over-unity power generation systems. I think that these are the solution to our power generation problems and giving rise to a clean, decentralized power generation system. I think these would prove useful to lessen some economic burdens on the middle- and lower-income classes.
Good on ya’ bro’. I could have never made it in life, as far as I did, which weren’t that far but luckier than most. Thanks to my Dad who I argued with my whole life but when the time came he supported me in ways that made it possible to survive in a decent way and move forward. A lot of folks did not have the family support I did and I am sorry about that, and feel blessed for what I do have.
This also shows the importance of FAMILY in society (I’m not saying you didn’t have a supportive family I have no idea) but that foundation of our society has obviously been seriously eroded as well documented in analyses of Jewish Supremacism going back however far you want but say with the Frankfort School which was an evil Kabbalistic Jewish plot to destroy Gentile society, that in a nutshell.
Hang in there bro’ I’m praying for you. Thank you.
I’m going to go out on a limb with an analogy: the economy is not unlike the ecology.
Economists and ecologists are studying the same thing, basically: the flow of energy. Inputs and outputs. Growth and decay. Cycles. One deals in dollars; the other deals in calories.
Ecologists have discovered that in the soil, beneath our notice, there is a vast microecology, composed of micro-organisms engaging in micro-transactions, and that if you ignore that you eventually sterilize your soil and it is game over until someone smarter and better than you comes along and invests the time and energy to reverse the situation.
(WotD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscule)
If we put our economy under a microscope it’s likely that we would quickly discover that our macroeconomy rests upon millions and billions of microeconomies – what I referred to, above, previously, as the original “stock markets”, and the individual transactions between individuals producers and consumers.
(https://www.winterwatch.net/2026/09/how-does-one-navigate-the-fun-house-mirrors-market/#comment-48115)
Some people would call this socialism. I would call it”you need to take care of the society – the sum of all interactions which fuel the perpetuation of the culture in which you are rooted”.
What is the economic equivalent of an arbuscule?
Note that the ecology – the real world – does not deal in futures. That is gambling; a human behavior. It leads to corruption.
Note that nature achieves very large projects without needing to dedicate vast resources. We use money to make very large projects happen faster. That is racing; a human behavior. It leads to corruption.
See, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way
My $0.02
I think the problem lies in that we have a major hoarding problem in this shit-stained world of ours. In the economic sphere, capitol has to flow out in as much as it must flow in. We see none of that. Take for example QE, QE2, then QE infinity at 0% interest of the last decade following 2008 bail outs. We were sold the line that it would re-start the engine of credit in which it would jump start the economic engine, to which that was a lie. Instead, all that “stimulus” went to the investment arm of the banks and as obscene bonuses for CEOs (hey gotta keep those mistresses happy, right?) who did nothing to earn it. It artificially inflated the asset prices, especially in the stock market. We had three administrations pointing to the stock indexes as proof that the economy is anything but anemic. Anyone with bills to pay and didn’t have the ability to issue bonds or have credit access lines at the FED to which they could pay it back with cheaper dollars thanks to an inflated M2 knew that was BS. Hence the current situation.
With proper capital outflows and ROI we have things like price discovery, valuations that are true (not inflated), funding of infrastructure, products (not just pure investment vehicles) and manufacturing of said products. It raises society as a whole not just an elite few. Instead of new products and services that have actual value, we see stock swapping mergers driving further monopolization. As we are reaching the end of this economic circle-jerk; we have too many dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services which makes for it being much harder to survive these days. This is evidenced by the fact that 82% of Americans having to dip into retirement savings just to pay their bills and the price of gold being $4,148.30 per oz as of this writing. With an economy that is geared towards maximum efficiency and profitability with little to no redundancy it will take no more than the equivalent of a mouse fart to knock this whole house of cards down. If I were to guess, I would expect this to happen no later than 2032 (probably sooner though) before the pitch forks and tiki torches to come out from sea to shining sea.
In conclusion, your ecological analogy for the economy is quite spot on Richard.
-Your Friendly Neighborhood Malcontent