When it’s storming outside and trees are bending in the wind, suddenly everybody wants to buy hurricane insurance. Of course, by that point it’s often too late as the insurance is prohibitively expensive, if you can even get it.

The easiest time to predict falling asset prices is when asset prices are already falling. You can choose to ignore the noise… though it’s more difficult to ignore it when the noise is coming from a powerful U.S. regulator.

When it’s storming outside and trees are bending in the wind, suddenly everybody wants to buy hurricane insurance. Of course, by that point it’s often too late as the insurance is prohibitively expensive, if you can even get it.

When Bitcoin is so buzz-worthy that it’s getting featured in the non-financial headlines, you know it must either be soaring or crashing. This time around it’s crashing, and retail traders everywhere are seeing their wealth disappear at an alarming rate.

Wall Street can be a heartless place where zero-sum gains mean that some folks must lose money so that others can make it. Hopefully, we can all take a mental day off from the Hunger Games-like financial markets and appreciate how our mothers instilled good values in us, including compassion and integrity.

It’s been said that during a bull market, stocks open low but close higher. The opposite is also true, though: during a bear market, stocks open high but then tank by the end of the day. Clearly, it’s not hard to figure out what type of market we’re in right now.

Borrow, spend, rinse and repeat: for generations, governments representing developed nations around the world have put the burden on tomorrow’s taxpayers to fund today’s entitlement programs. It’s a great way for politicians to get re-elected, but print-and-spend programs are bound to have dire consequences sooner or later.

Buying stock market index funds works, until it doesn’t. This is going to a hard-learned lesson as legions of amateur traders, lured by meme stocks and social media chatter of “diamond hands,” painfully witness the market principle of “stairs up, elevator down” in action.

After getting drunk on years of ultra-accommodative monetary policy, the nation’s central bank must now take away the punch bowl. The second interest-rate raise since 2018 is something that everyone’s expecting but seemingly nobody wants, and which the financial markets certainly weren’t prepared for.