How will you deal with the Big Crash? What is your plan?

2008 was great year, but my style of counter trend trading is about using insurance and keep plugging away. On the Monthlies had divergences. I bought my core of stocks in 2009 and sold up to 95% 4 days before the recent all time highs. That was a bit of luck.

My Grandfather did very well during depression and taught me well. Dumped all my real estate 4 years ago, if depression comes, money is king and will buy real estate towards end of depression.

My skills gotten better at hedging open profits and counter trend. Dumped all my gold coins when gold reached new highs.

Switched all monies out of stocks to options and long term commodities. Reduced scalping 50% for now, risk too great, tougher to get filled at full quantity.

Automation helps much, no human intervention.
 
It will take a few more rounds of tightening by the Fed to get the herd heading to the exits. With so much money in index funds, the waves of selling will be unrelenting I imagine.

I don’t see a 1930’s-type depression reappearing. After 2008, it’s clear the Fed will buy up everything, either directly or through proxies, to prevent a true panic bottom. I’m thinking stagnation and a lost decade or two similar to what Japan saw after its bubble popped.
 
Rising interest rates has little if anything to do with the market crashing. Its just that having no interest rates for a long time has created the mother of all bubbles. Well that and printing currency like a drunken sailor.

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Just wondering what everyone's plan is, for when/if we get a really really really big crash in all markets with general profound recession/depression. I am thinking in unsettled times, there might be a risk in short selling, or buying reverse ETFs, etc because the markets as we know them could simply dissolve. Go away. I know that "isn't possible", but I am thinking about physically holding a good chunk of the nest egg in gold. Yeah, buried in the back yard, 4 paces due North of the big pecan tree, in a mason jar, two feet down. LOL jk but not kidding about the gold.

Who made out in 2008? What was the overall strategy? Would it work again? Did you hedge with real property and physical assets? I know nobody here was trading in 1929, but did the bears hang in there and ride it all the way down, and make out like bandits? Were there limits on shorting, imposed by the government or by the exchanges? Any forced liquidations of short positions?

I think the bear markets brought about by Covid and Ukraine have taken a lot of pressure off the markets and it will be a couple of years before "the big one" is really something to be concerned about. Raised interest rates are about all we really will be concerned with, I think, barring another calamity. And okay, yeah, rising debt is an issue but I think the economy can carry it for a while longer. The conditions that the markets faced and the lack of oversight of 1929 just aren't there. Even the recent "crashes" didn't have what I would call a major effect on John Q Public. I wasn't trading, wasn't investing, and so I didn't even notice, though my pension plans took a face plant, due to irresponsible management not of my own. (Unfortunately fund managers get paid no matter what, rain or shine, and have little incentive to liquidate in favor of cash or bonds when the market is tanking.) Crash? What crash? I was still working, still earning, still spending and living large. No soup line for me. That wasn't "the big one", IYAM. But some day the other shoe could drop. Not "worried", but trying to put a plan together.
Christ Man! Snap out, now! Paranoïa is a treatable condition...
 
The market can only fall a few percent until its halted. You will have the fed telling they will print trillions if necessary. From there markets go up. Only real crash possible is hyperinflation. If that happens your money at the exchange won't matter anyways since if the USD has hyperinflation the entire world has it too.

Wow. That paragraph was almost 100% wrong.
 
In 2008 I remember Proshares started their first -2X Sector ETF -- SKF 2X Short the XLF. I was up over $75K on it until the government decided to institute a shorting ban on the TBTF institutions and I sold but I did pretty good.

I had a friend who worked at Barclay's PWM division and he told me to get out in Jan 2008 because their top credit analyst said the CDS' were skyrocketing on the global banks. He was spot on.
 
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