When the fear reaches its maximum—like it just did recently, thanks to Trump’s brilliant idea of reviving tariff wars—two types of voices fill the air.

First, you hear the doom choirs: influencers and media outlets singing about the end of the world. Stocks will go to zero. Crypto will evaporate. Civilization will collapse before your VPN subscription expires.

Then comes the second wave: the “heroes.” The self-anointed protagonists who tell you, with glowing smiles and epic background music, that this is the perfect moment to buy everything dirt cheap. To scoop up assets while the plebs are panicking.

It feels good. It sounds brave.

It might even work—but it cannot be done blindly.

There’s an old gospel that gets sung louder every time markets crash: Buy the dip.

Simple. Seductive. Suicidal.

When prices collapse, it feels like a clearance sale. Everything looks cheap. Charts bleed red, social media screams opportunity, and somewhere in the distance, a friend calling you politely for some money to double down on a failed memecoin. Again.

But here’s the part that bagholders (myself included, many times over) love to forget: not everything that falls will rise again.

Some assets aren’t discounted. They’re being written off.

Damodaran, in his latest post, puts it bluntly: in crashes, markets don’t just overcorrect—they reassess. They rethink fundamentals. They discard fantasies. And when that reassessment happens, no amount of dip-buying will save an asset that should never have been worth its previous price in the first place.

A comeback requires survival.

A dying business won’t care how low you caught the knife. A scam token won’t moon just because you prayed to your lord. A meme stock won’t deliver shareholder value because you made a nice diamond hands meme.

Buying the dip is not a free lottery ticket.

It’s a calculated gamble where the only real edge comes from knowing what you’re actually buying into—and whether it even deserves to come back.

The big returns—the 2x, 5x, 10x recoveries—only happen for assets that the world still believes in after the panic dust settles. Companies with real earnings. Projects with real adoption. Assets with real demand.

Everything else? Roadkill.

The cruel truth:

• Some dips are invitations.
• Some dips are eulogies.

Knowing which is which isn’t about looking at how far something has fallen. It’s about understanding why it’s falling—and whether the fall is justified.

So next time your screen goes red and your palms itch for that dopamine hit of “buying the fear”—pause.

Ask yourself:

• Am I buying a temporary panic, or a permanent decline?
• Is this a business correction, or a funeral?

Because not all recoveries are inevitable.
And in this market, hope is expensive—and liquidation is cheap.

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