By John Grace
Contributing Columnist
Let the record show: back in October on Yahoo Finance in New York, I warned that crypto looked like it had topped.
Since then, Bitcoin has fallen 30%, once again proving itself an unusually sharp leading indicator. Nvidia, meanwhile, has been acting as a slightly lagging one. Stocks haven’t fallen quite far enough yet to confirm a full-blown top, but we’re getting uncomfortably close. A retest of the Nasdaq’s October 2022 lows — or a classic 40% first-wave decline — may signal that investors are about to party like it’s 1929 in both stocks and real estate.
And here’s where we are today: the CNN Fear & Greed Index is flashing “extreme fear.” The top of our investing lifetime may very well have been stamped on Oct. 29. That’s the kind of moment when strategies either save people … or sink them.
This is precisely why I keep hammering the same lesson: investing and sports have more in common than most people think. You don’t win championships without a vigorous defense, and you don’t survive major market downturns without one, either.
Pretending otherwise? That’s how people get blindsided.
My job is to prepare investors for shock and awe before the grits hits the fan. And we never insult them with the old “just live with the losses” routine. That’s not a strategy — that’s surrender. Instead, we deploy the three pillars that have consistently kept investors above water during the worst storms of the past two decades:
• Active management — When markets shift, we shift. Moving between shares and cash — based on actual conditions rather than blind hope — reduces drawdowns and keeps retirees from riding the roller coaster without a seatbelt. This approach was a lifesaver in 2008, again in 2022, and once more in the first quarter of 2025.
• Alternative investments — When traditional markets do swan dives, alternatives often don’t follow the script. Private credit and equity, real assets, and contractual cash-flow strategies help diversify away from the mood swings of stocks. In every significant downturn since the financial crisis, this layer of diversification has been one of the key reasons investors stayed afloat.
• Critical infrastructure, especially data — This is where the future is sprinting. Tech companies are forecasting more than $360 billion in capital expenditures for AI-driven data center buildouts in 2025 alone. That’s not a trend; that’s a tidal wave. Data-center infrastructure benefits from long-term contracts, relentless digital demand and usage patterns that rise regardless of what the S&P 500 is doing. In volatile periods, that kind of consistency isn’t just helpful — it’s oxygen.
Combine those three pillars, and you get something rare: a strategy built not on hope, but on math, discipline and diversification that works in the real world. It worked in 2008. It worked in 2022. It worked in quarter one of 2025. And with markets flashing warning signs yet again, it’s what investors need now.
Preparation trumps prediction. Because the next storm doesn’t care whether you’re ready, but your results will.
John Grace is a registered representative with LPL Financial. His On the Money column runs monthly in The Wave. The opinions expressed here are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
LIFTOUT
You don’t win championships without a vigorous defense, and you don’t survive major market downturns without one, either.
