[I talk about predicting the future in this essay. I mention that up front because maybe then you can take on the walls of text.]
Companies always go to shit eventually and you're left holding the bag. Spesh because there's no dividends and companies never wind down, they just do gambits with borrowed money. That's the Way of the American CEO. Dude these dumbasses even publish books about that being the way, like Jack Welch's suckafucking book Straight from the Gut yeah spilled his guts alright.
That means that when they can't pay that debt, the creditors have priority, shares get no part of any of the money. So CEOs can't own debt on their own company (I think, there's rules, like they all get broken but there's still rules and breaking them has a cost like in slaps on the wrist, like it has to be very intermediated, because otherwise duh first thing everybody would do is short the company they run and fly it into a mountain). So it looks very smooth, very well thought-out, high-integrity, the American tax system is like that too, looks air tight on form 1040, and if you dig it looks more and more airtight until--whoosh cracked window on an airplane everything flying out. Nah.
Dude get in and get the fuck out. Know when to sell. Bill Browder, whom I don't think much of in most regards and have ripped on here explained why he's a nomad. But having talked him down, he does say smart dead-on-the-money intel. You gotta know first off when to get in. Under the thesis that it's exponential (it's impossible to respect that thesis, cubic at best, cubic is short and sweet, "ex-po-nen-tial" is a mouthful) so you can get in whenever it makes no difference. There's no sexy part of the exponential, every part of the exponential is sexy. Like I don't know I got advice like get out right when it's taking off--it never takes off. It's identical to its derivative, no inflection points, no maxima, no minima, it's the comparable in its uniformity to a flatline. In a sense it is a flatline because of inflation, that connects both curves, e^x - e^x = 0, f(x)=0 is the flatline. Alternately, e^x / e^x = 1, f(x)=1, though that's a totally different flatline.
So there is a moment to get in and that's when there's a genuine crash that nobody saw coming, that later is said to be impossible to predict--dude that's when. But to get in at that point you need to have gotten out before then, ideally at the peak. So because of relativity you can't react to the peak, see oh it just peaked time to sell--no there's a delay, like coupla hours for a customer to talk to his broker, so gotta preempt the peak by a coupla hours, that means gotta give the sell order pre-peak--meaning while it's still going up according to some smooth description of the Brownian curve (you never see it in the full grain, that information costs money an hn user doesn't pay). So it's critical your broker try to talk you out of it--that's a very good sign, just convince him you're stupid and he'll say "eh, masochist"--that's exactly what you want to hear. Because if you do depart the cyclical assets at the peak of the cycle and transfer it to countercyclical assets, then you get a bonus from them (not much, gold is politically oppressed by practically all empires, only one exception) so like gold won't double, but in my analysis that's because it's too feared so instead Bitcoin would jump, and I bet on it on margin almost at the trough, and I got 90% of the appreciation in Oct-Nov last year.
So that's the thing, selling near the top. So it's a totally political move, just like predicting the peak on Sep 27 (when the Fed announced the rate hikes, charts lie inflation lies that was the peak that was when the shit got really sticky and the pipes backed up) 30 days before. So for my personal protection, in order not to be subjected to additional psychiatric malpractice and experiments and all that shit, instead of saying my spine gave me a trillion-dollar twitch, I will play the fool card and say it was a quadrillion dollar twitch. What's the difference? For me both are infinite resources, even a million dollars is infinite resources. The difference--even if I say this explicitly--is when I say quadrillion shrinks say I'm crazy, which is good that's what I want. Chose which ward I end up in carefully. Dude no spinal taps.