Markets are never short on warnings or opinions. What is truly scarce are people who, amid the warnings and noise, still insist on letting data speak and favor long-term participation over short-term predictions.

I. Elliott Sounds the Bear Market Alarm: From FOMO to FOGO

“Every bear market warning light is flashing!” The hedge fund giant Elliott Investment Management has issued a stark warning. According to a November 2 report by The Wall Street Journal, in an October letter to investors, Elliott, led by Paul Singer, said the current market environment bears a striking resemblance to the “Roaring Twenties” before the Great Depression: debt-fueled risk appetite, a frenzy for new technologies, and nearly every warning sign of a major bear market flashing.

Elliott listed a range of overlapping risks: the U.S. budget deficit continuing to widen, persistently high inflation, vulnerabilities in private credit portfolios, and asset bubbles fueled by the AI boom. In the AI sector, it singled out three major concerns: circular investment between AI model companies and AI infrastructure manufacturers, debt-financed capital spending, and the emerging anti-AI social movement. Elliott warned that if AI product pricing came under pressure or market expectations for AI buildout contracted, the shock “could be historic, at least as severe as any bear market in recent decades.” Speculative activity such as zero-day options trading and meme-stock bets was also seen as increasingly akin to gambling, distorting the market’s pricing mechanisms.

Elliott believes that if one or two of the key factors underpinning the current bull market were to reverse, market sentiment could shift abruptly from “fear of missing out” (FOMO) to “fear of getting wiped out” (FOGO). Dragged down by its defensive strategy, Elliott’s return was nearly flat in the third quarter, with gains of just under 2% for the first nine months of the year. It lagged the PivotalPath Hedge Fund Composite Index and fell far short of the S&P 500’s total return of about 13% and the short-term U.S. Treasury index’s gain of about 3% over the same period.

Co-CEOs and co-chief investment officers Paul Singer and Jonathan Pollock said that the strategy’s focus is now on preserving capital, maintaining ample liquidity, and waiting for opportunities to buy the dip after market turmoil. The letter said that in Elliott’s 50-year history, periods of calm have indeed occurred, but they have often been accompanied by market turmoil and followed by rare windows of opportunity. The goal is to be fully prepared: protected against downside risk, while holding capital that can be used to buy bargains at market lows and waiting for the tide to turn again. In the third quarter, Elliott’s losing positions included distressed debt investments and portfolio hedges related to gold, currencies, equities, and interest rates; its winning positions included commodities, arbitrage trades, and credit-related portfolio hedges. In terms of opportunities, it favors activist investing in healthcare, energy assets, and forced-selling opportunities arising from dislocations in credit markets. Recent holdings include PepsiCo and chip design software maker Synopsys.

Last month, Elliott managing partner Jesse Cohn reflected on X that the market landscape had fundamentally changed: “The stock market feels different now because it is different. Winners keep winning, losers get crushed, market reactions during earnings season are becoming harder to predict, and swings are getting bigger.”

II. The Simple Strategy of (Just Keep Buying): Data First, Opinions Second

After reading Nick Maggiulli’s (Just Keep Buying), my strongest impression wasn’t that I’d learned a particular strategy, but that I’d encountered a rare quality: in a world of personal finance full of opinions, the discipline to follow the data alone.

The author is a data scientist, and behind every conclusion are decades of market data. His reasoning is almost stubbornly simple: run the numbers first, then form an opinion; if the data doesn’t support it, don’t say it, no matter how popular the idea is.

There’s no shortage of advice in personal finance: save 20%, avoid debt, young people must buy a home. The author tests each claim, and the results are counterintuitive. For example, the ironclad rule to “save 20% every month” has never been backed by data; it’s simply an easy-to-spread idea. How much you save should depend on your income, expenses, and stage of life—not on a one-size-fits-all percentage. Most personal finance mistakes don’t come from not knowing the rules, but from believing the wrong ones.

The book offers an extremely simple framework for deciding where to focus: compare how much you can save this year with how much your investment portfolio can generate in a year. Put your energy into whichever is greater. With $5,000 in principal and a 10% return, you earn just $500 in a year; but saving an extra $500 a month adds up to $6,000 in a year. When your human capital far exceeds your financial capital, increasing your income is the most effective investment. Young people shouldn’t be studying asset allocation; they should be working hard to make themselves more valuable. Once the snowball grows and investment returns exceed savings, shift your focus to allocation. There’s a limit to how much you can cut spending, but no limit to how much you can increase your income.

The book’s sharpest blow is aimed at “waiting for a pullback to buy.” Using decades of U.S. stock market data, the author shows that if you have money to invest, putting it in immediately outperforms gradually investing it about two-thirds of the time over the long run—and beats holding cash while waiting for a crash. Even more sobering is the famous experiment: even if you could perfectly buy at every market bottom—a feat not even God could manage—your long-term returns would still struggle to beat those of an ordinary person who doesn’t overthink it and simply buys on schedule every month. That’s because markets go up more often than they go down. While you wait for the perfect entry point, the market is waiting for your cash flow. Rather than predict, participate.

The author also offers a gentle innovation: the 2x rule. Want to spend $10,000 on a luxury item you’ve had your eye on? Go ahead—but also invest $10,000 in an income-generating asset. If you can do that, buy it without worry. Every time you treat yourself, your assets grow alongside the purchase, guilt fades, and you’re more likely to stick with the plan. Personal finance isn’t an ascetic practice; those who deprive themselves for too long will eventually rebound by overspending. You’ll never feel rich, and that’s okay: wealth grows, but so do desires. That’s not failure—it’s human nature. Time is the most important asset. Use it to build human capital, then let financial capital take over. Personal finance is simply the gradual conversion of human capital, which ages, into financial capital, which never retires. Stop trying to predict the market and start participating in it. Time rewards everyone who stays invested.

III. BPP: A Closer Look at Inflation

Beyond macroeconomic warnings, tracking inflation also calls for more granular tools. The Bloomberg Price Project (BPP) uses alternative data to track the U.S. Consumer Price Index, covering 87% of the CPI basket across goods and services. It collects millions of price observations from credit card transactions, e-commerce sites, grocery stores, pharmacies, rental listings, corporate data, market prices on the Bloomberg Terminal, and government records.

It provides more detail than the official CPI data: BPP breaks the CPI basket down into nearly 700 components, compared with only about 200 in the official data. The project was developed by Bloomberg economists and researchers including Anna Wong, Durie, Daniel Ripperger-Suhler, Joshua Danial, and Scott Johnson.

IV. Intel: Fundamentals Aren’t Useless—We Just Need to Look Deeper

Intel plunged after its earnings report, going from market darling to fallen star, leaving fundamentals-focused investors red-faced. Some say, “You couldn’t have spotted the earnings problem in advance from the fundamentals; technical analysis had already signaled the move.” Is that really true?

Before Intel’s earnings report, I posted a preview screenshot on OKX and pointed out that rising memory and storage costs and pressure in the PC end market were quite apparent, with the real test coming in the fourth quarter. When finished PCs sell slowly, it’s only a matter of time before distributors adjust their orders. That was the biggest problem in Intel’s latest earnings report: PC sales were weak this quarter while server sales were strong, and revenue met expectations. But next quarter, PC sales are expected to be even weaker, with a much steeper decline, while server sales are expected to be even stronger—leaving the overall revenue outlook below expectations.

Of course, I didn’t get everything right. My preview underestimated both of Intel’s major businesses: I underestimated the strength of the server business, which exceeded expectations in both this quarter and the next; more seriously, I greatly underestimated the decline in the PC business. I expected PCs to do poorly, but the deterioration was far worse than expected. I got the direction right, but completely misjudged the magnitude.

But can we say that fundamentals are completely useless and couldn’t reveal the problem? If so, it only means we haven’t examined the fundamentals closely or deeply enough. Look deeply and broadly enough, and the potential problems will naturally become visible. My abilities are still limited, though, and I can’t yet accurately predict how serious the problems will be. Even technical analysis makes it difficult to predict exactly how far a stock will fall or rise, or to identify precise price levels.

It has to be said: stock prices really can change people’s views and opinions. I’ve seen plenty of bloggers lambasting Intel over the past couple of days, but just a few weeks ago, Intel was still their favorite.

Conclusion

Elliott’s warning reminds us to respect risk; the simple strategy in (Just Keep Buying) reminds us not to let waiting take the place of participating; BPP reminds us to examine the data more closely; and Intel’s lesson is that fundamentals aren’t useless—we just have to look deeper. Markets are always shifting between noise and signal. Predict less and participate more; follow the crowd less and research more deeply. Time rewards everyone who stays invested and is willing to look one layer deeper.