Finding an Opportunity in a Crisis

Crises create noise, but they also create openings. This analysis cuts through the panic of market disruption to identify where real opportunities emerge — for investors, founders, and corporations willing to look past the headlines and act on the underlying shifts.

Crisis by definition represents a stark deviation from the norm, and deviations often create a lot of noise. Are we in a health crisis, or a financial crisis, or both? Is cash king? Should I sell all my stocks right now, or buy the dips instead? Is the Fed serious with the $2tn bail-out package? Is that why the S&P 500 is back up to 2,900 so quickly when there are 6.5m+ job losses claimed ? Is this the stage for Bitcoin to finally shine as a truly deflationary hedge mechanism in the digital era? But why has the supposedly uncorrelated asset shown such a strong correlation to the sharpest decline in stock market history in 30+ years ? Was the WeWork debacle really the least troubling news to come out in the past 6 months? Most importantly, when and where is the bottom? To unravel these trains of thoughts racing through our heads, we often look to prudent investors and industry leaders to remind ourselves of perspective-awakening principles such as: “Crisis is a terrible thing to waste”; “The best way out is always through.” At TechNexus, we recently held a webinar with the former Executive Chairman/CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, to talk about what to make of all that’s going on, and how his teams at Cisco had remained resilient in previous crises by focusing on the facts, and persistently holding a long term view . “The truth is that each time a market is in transition, you can either gain or lose market share.” — John Chambers Chambers’ prescience to tap into opportunities from downturns actually goes way back — all the way back to the Asia financial crisis in 1997. Despite the volatility of the Asia markets, and contrary to many of Cisco’s competitors significantly dialing back their resources, Cisco focused on the fact that with the rise of countries like India and China, Asia would come to play a critical role in the global economy in the next decades. As John saw the market transition as “an undercurrent propelling the technology market in a generally unforese

By Multiple Authors at TechNexus Venture Collaborative