>Ironically a lot of money can be made in downturns if you know where to look and how to approach it.
Can you expand on this? I'm honestly curious about what machinations begin once a company dies or the market sinks.
Can you expand on this? I'm honestly curious about what machinations begin once a company dies or the market sinks.
But a couple key things change (many more do too these are two I look for), yes capital is harder to come by, or at least requires better fundamentals and connections but the overall market is in a selling mood (e.g. good buying market). So enterprises and healthy businesses are looking for things to buy on the cheap (which is relative to the high of the market), and how to expand cost effectively. There is of course a cool down period that you have to get through before this starts happening.
Enterprises after they snap up their initial FTE roles they need to fill start looking for a lot more consultants to fill project roles versus bringing on more FTE's. This opens up more consulting gigs at pretty favorable pricing usually. You can now hire people to expand a consulting practice because people are less expensive so you can grow when things are "down" for others.
When the air pops out of the system people also get discouraged from the market and run away. A lot of the speculators will back out and so it becomes a more sane environment for a few years. If you are a developer and just work through it as things recover you change jobs a couple of times and you can really jump your salary during the recovery because there is a time when demand becomes super high but supply again is low. This also is again where it is awesome to be a consultant, I kept increasing the rates for my company all through the downturn and people would pay.
Outside of tech a downturn is usually time to capitalize on real estate, rentals and a host of other things. But you have to set yourself up to do this usually a little before things take a full slide into that first year. But if you are relatively debt free and can take some debt on during the down point of the market on real estate you can make a lot of money on the upswing. To be clear, real estate may not crash at the same time or rate, or may not at all. But the demands for rentals vs buying changes as does the buying power of people, so you can leverage those both.
So there's this giant catfish in Japanese mythology, the Namazu. It's captive in the ocean, under a giant keystone held down by the daimyojin Kashima. When Kashima gets tired or distracted, he lets off pressure a little, the Namazu wriggles around to get free and that wriggling sets off earthquakes and subsequently, tsunamis.
After an earthquake, there's always a rebuilding and a redistribution of wealth. And after the Edo earthquake of 1855, woodcut prints depicting the namazu and society (namazu-e), money falling from the sky, businessmen vomiting and defecating money, etc. got super popular. (https://www.illustrationchronicles.com/When-Giant-Catfish-Sh...)