These are confusing times, investing stops being a numbers game, which I much prefer and becomes a pattern recognition game. The numbers are unreliable and fragile, the fundamentals distorted, and the narratives unstable. In this kind of environment we are drowning in noise and trying to get ahead of what might or then again might not be a gathering storm.
So in this piece that few will read and fewer relate to, I’m going to try and distill a strategy.
Here's how I see it, five idea for investing in this time of volatility, compression and fracture.
1. Control the Chokepoints
Forget demand curves. We're in the era of engineered scarcity and weaponisation. Rare earths, critical minerals, energy, defense — these aren't just sectors anymore, they're geopolitical fault lines. The West is finally waking up to the fact that China controls capacity in everything from rare earths to lithium, to plastic toys to drones. The trade war isn't about tariffs anymore; it's about who controls.
If you're investing, you're betting on control. On access. On the ability to extract margin from being the only game in town. That might be a chemical process, a permitting moat, or a downstream monopoly, a piece of tech, a brand that no one can replicate. Either way, the play is to own the bottleneck. Scarcity is no longer natural — it's manufactured and if you can kind a gate no one else has spotted you can stake it out.
2. Trade the Narrative, Don't Worship It
We live in memetic markets now. Capital doesn't just follow fundamentals, it follows stories. It always has, but now its amplified and overwhelming. Bitcoin, AI, tech in general— these aren't just sectors, they're belief systems. And belief systems come in cycles.
Right now, we're in the institutional FOMO phase of Bitcoin. TradFi wants in, and the narrative is peaking. When everyone agrees on the upside, there's no upside left. That doesn't mean it collapses immediately — bubbles can run longer than anyone expects — but it does mean it's a time to trade, not invest. Then again if you are not a trader, don’t get sucked in, know to leave it alone.
3. Compress Everything
The world is being crushed by its own weight. Systems are breaking under complexity — whether in geopolitics, AI, finance, or climate. The winners aren't the ones who expand — they're the ones who compress. Who reduce noise. Who create dense, functional leverage out of chaos.
In AI, it's clear: the power isn't in the tokens, it's in the weights. Compression is where intelligence lives. The same is true in investing. Find the companies and technologies that compress complexity into usable form whether that's a simple tech stack, an elegant process, or a brutal bit of IP that does one thing better than anyone else.
Volatility is noise. Compression is signal. Own the signal.
4. Preserve the Core
When everything is accelerating, the most valuable assets are the ones that don't decay. Gold, real estate, base-layer crypto — these aren't just defensive plays; they're temporal anchors. They hold their shape while the rest of the system vibrates itself apart.
The same logic applies to IP, to deep tech, to anything with long-term information density. You're not looking for momentum. You're looking for structure that survives. Preservation is underrated. Durability as alpha.
5. Find novel convexity
Forget safety. In chaotic systems, safety is often an illusion — but asymmetry is real. Asymmetry means you can be wrong small and right big. That's the only edge that survives in high-volatility environments.
The play is to find positions where the downside is acceptable and the upside is open-ended. That doesn't mean chasing lottery tickets it means looking for situations with low risk and unappreciated, perhaps second derivative consequence. In a bifurcating global economy, ugly ducklings can suddenly be black swans and dead horse suddenly floggable.
The world is unstable. Convex bets — ones that pay off disproportionately in tail scenarios — are a rational target.
This is a lens to scan the investment horizon with: Control the chokepoints. Surf the narrative. Compress complexity. Preserve the core. Bet on discovered convexity. If nothing sparkles as you can with it, then nothing lost, but if suddenly something jumps out at you then perhaps that an investment for these crazy times.