Who Is Making Money in an Uncertain Market?
By Diego Alcalá When a market becomes uncertain, everyone wants to know the same thing: who is making money, and how can I copy them? The popular answer usually
By Diego Alcalá · Mon Oct 05 2026 · Investing
By Diego Alcalá
When a market becomes uncertain, everyone wants to know the same thing: who is making money, and how can I copy them? The popular answer usually points to one of three people: the person who saw it coming, the person who got lucky, or the person bold enough to make a big bet in the direction the market eventually took. In general, those explanations miss the point. The people who truly benefit from uncertainty are rarely prophets or daredevils. More often, they were prepared before the uncertainty arrived.
That distinction, between predicting and preparing, should change how we approach the crises ahead. One cannot be reliably learned as a way to foresee the future; the other can be practised.
It Is About Being Ready, Not Guessing Correctly
Let us start by dismantling the myth of the person who “saw it coming.” Nobody predicts crises consistently. Someone who got this one right may have missed earlier ones and may miss the next. We often fall into survivorship bias. During the Second World War, Abraham Wald examined aircraft returning with bullet damage and warned against reinforcing only the areas with the most holes. Those aircraft had returned. Aircraft hit in other areas were not coming back to be studied.
Something similar happens when we look at winners in volatile markets. We see the person who made a large bet and won, and we want to copy them. We do not see all the people who made equally large bets and disappeared. The bold investor we celebrate may simply be the aircraft that returned. Copying a visible winner is dangerous when we cannot see the graveyard of those who tried the same thing and lost.
Uncertainty Does Not Erase Opportunities
Do opportunities disappear when everything becomes volatile and uncertain? Quite the opposite. Uncertainty does not eliminate opportunities; it sharpens the filter separating those who can take advantage of them from those who cannot. Louis Pasteur expressed the idea that chance favours the prepared mind. A crisis can distribute opportunities generously, but only someone who arrives with their hands free can pick them up.
The Advantages Are Built Before the Crisis
The advantages that matter during a crisis are not acquired in the middle of it. They are built beforehand. I have written about each of them, so I will name them briefly: liquidity, so you can buy when others are forced to sell; information and judgement, so you can recognize an opportunity disguised as a catastrophe; and patience, so you have waited without wasting your resources on false alarms.
Someone who tries to assemble those three things after the problem has erupted arrives late. They are like a parachute: you pack it before jumping, not during the fall.
Where Calm Money Tends to Seek Shelter
In practice, when conditions become difficult, for whatever reason you choose to name, thoughtful capital tends to gravitate toward what remains necessary. Defensive sectors, affordable housing, basic needs and recurring cash flows all belong in that discussion. People still need food, medicine, somewhere to rent, essential services and energy when markets shake. Assets tied to those needs often suffer less and recover sooner. That is a tendency to evaluate, not a promise that any particular investment is protected from losses.
In 1939, as Europe entered war and panic dominated markets, John Templeton did something that looks logical in hindsight but was difficult to understand at the time. He bought small amounts of a broad range of cheap shares. He was not predicting the outcome of the war or choosing its winning side. He had positioned himself to benefit from other people's extreme pessimism. Years later, that decision contributed to his wealth. The lesson is positioning, not prophecy.
Copy the Thinking, Not the Purchase
This brings us to the most useful part of the discussion. You cannot copy the exact investment that made someone else successful. Their opportunity has passed, their circumstances were unique, and their moment will not repeat itself. Trying to reproduce the “what” is like chasing a train that has already left the station. You cannot go back and buy Bitcoin at 1,000 dollars or property in San Pedro at 5,000 pesos per square metre.
What you can reproduce is the “how”: the structure of their thinking and decision-making. It is the difference between copying a dish and learning to cook. If you copy a dish, you depend on being given the exact recipe every time. If you learn to cook, you can work with the ingredients available to you.
That transferable structure means keeping liquidity as a matter of principle, defining your criteria while you are calm, distinguishing volatility from deterioration, judging decisions by their process rather than their results, and having the discipline to act when others freeze. Those habits, rather than a particular stock or fashionable sector, are what can carry from one successful investor to another.
Preparing Before You Cross a Border
For a Canadian or another international investor considering an opportunity in the United States, this distinction is especially useful. Someone else's successful U.S. purchase is not your investment plan. Their available capital, familiarity with the local market and ability to wait may differ from yours.
Apply the same preparation to your own circumstances. Before a seller creates urgency, decide what information you need, what would make you walk away and what resources must remain available after a purchase. A trip to inspect a business or a property does not create an obligation to buy it. Having the ability to act also includes having the patience to decline.
This is an application of the same thesis, not a claim that investing across a border guarantees better returns. The objective is to arrive with a decision process you can use, rather than to borrow someone else's confidence when your own questions remain unanswered.
The next time you see someone making money amid chaos, do not simply ask what they bought or what you should invest in. Ask what they had ready before the chaos began, and what way of thinking brought them there. An uncertain market does not create winners from nothing; it reveals who did the homework while nobody was watching. Uncertainty is not the exam. It is the day the grades are handed out.
If the next crisis arrived tomorrow, would you be among those with the resources to take advantage of an opportunity, or among those left wishing they had prepared?
Educational opinion by Diego Alcalá. This article is not financial, legal or tax advice, and is not an investment recommendation.
Cover photograph: parachute preparation, Tammie Ramsouer / U.S. Air Force, 2013, DVIDS, public domain. Used as an illustration of preparation; no institutional endorsement is implied.