Intuitively, it may seem that for the long-term investor, the best companies are those that consistently make money by selling basic necessities to people, whether the economy is growing or declining. However, a recent<a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w34402"> article</a> published by the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research shows that the market is taking a toll on that psychological comfort. Issuers whose businesses are more dependent on the state of the economy have historically generated higher returns than securities of companies with stable earnings.

How crises affect stock returns: cyclical and defensive securities

NVIDIA Corporation

Palantir Technologies Inc.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Legendary investor Michael Burry, who predicted the 2008 mortgage crisis and was the hero of the book and movie "The Downgrade," <a href="https://oninvest.com/article/rynok-zdet-neskol-ko-trudnyh-let-glavnoe-iz-interv-u-b-urri-avtoru-the-big-short">says</a> there is a bubble in the market that is "eerily" reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. In his recent posts on social networks X and SubStack, he predicts that the current leaders of the AI race will repeat the fate of the investor favorites of the 1990s, whose fame faded after the collapse of the bubble. Oninvest looked at three of his key analogies to see what lessons Burry believes history has in store for today's investors.

Lessons from history: will Nvidia, Palantir and OpenAI repeat the fate of the stars of the dot-com bubble?

GameStop Corp.

Robinhood Markets, Inc.

Retail investing has undergone a revolution in recent years. Small traders are no longer disorganized individuals, sometimes with a legion of names. Telegram channels with signals, threads on Reddit, profile forums, and "auto follow" functions in brokerage applications have created the illusion that collective intelligence can beat the market.

Dangerous unity: how social media is worsening stock trading results

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is one of the most influential visionaries of our time. Not only is his company the largest in the world based on market capitalization, but it is also at the epicenter of a global technology revolution, making his public appearances important to investors.

AI, the singularity and robots: what did the head of Nvidia reveal on Joe Rogan's podcast?

Vonovia SE

There is a well-established axiom in the world of personal finance: rent your home and invest the difference in stocks. The authors of many economic bestsellers, including Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, assure that your own home is an asset with high risks and low returns. The famous American economist<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Cochrane"> John Cochrane</a> even called investments in housing for own residence<a href="https://academic.oup.com/rof/article/26/1/1/6484661?guestAccessKey=373ccdfc-2eb2-447b-b70a-5adca6a395b1&amp;login=false#:~:text=The%20average%20personal,discourage%20such%20investment."> "disastrous".</a>

Real estate vs. the stock market: what makes people richer?

Tesla, Inc.

Investor warns that companies giving away their own shares to employees directly harms shareholders

Burry criticizes companies for being generous to employees. Tesla and Palantir are under his attack

In 2024, when the S&amp;P 500 added 25%, the average investor received only 16.5%, according to a <a href="https://www.dalbar.com/qaib/">study by</a> the financial-analytical company DALBAR. Over the long haul, the difference in returns is more modest, but the direction is the same: year after year, the "behavioral" downside eats up about 1% of the lost returns. It is not the commission or the quality of the strategy - it is a behavioral gap: the instrument is chosen correctly, but the moment is not. Economist Denis Elakhovsky wrote about the chronic problem of index funds and how a retail investor can avoid getting into trouble.

Mind the Gap: why funds win over the investors who invest in them

Webull Corporation

SoFi Technologies, Inc.

Modern brokerage applications for retail investors increasingly look like mobile games: simplified navigation, bright colors, animation, a system of "pumping up" the level achieved by the user, "fireworks" after a transaction, integration of social network elements with a system of reactions to other people's posts. As a result, the boundary between service improvement and behavioral manipulation is thinning and sometimes disappearing altogether. And zoomers and uneducated people are "to blame" for this.

Gamification in brokerage applications: when the interface decides for you

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Over the past three years, the classic 60/40 portfolio concept<a href="https://www.morningstar.com/economy/6040-portfolio-150-year-markets-stress-test"> has</a> proven to be very disappointing - the gold standard of 60% invested in stocks and 40% in bonds has proven to be unprofitable. There is no universal answer to what to do, but there are benchmarks that allow you to check your allocation against the way the world's capital is structured. For example,<a href="https://www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/reports/2025/10/15/21c88473-1287-408f-97f8-36c7a80340cb.html"> The World Portfolio</a>, a new research project by Goldman Sachs, which for the first time analyzes the entire "world portfolio" - from stocks and bonds to gold and cryptocurrencies.

Dennis Elakhovsky

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Reward for risk: how much it costs to run away from volatility