 Good day, fellow investors. There is so much talk about an imminent stock market crash and recession coming that I really want to give you my perspective on this and how you can prepare for the next stock market crash, how you can take advantage of it, and how you can end up wealthier, happier, and better from a financial perspective. Now, nobody likes a stock market crash. People are obviously very concerned because the last two times when there was a stock market crash and a recession, stocks fell 50%. I wouldn't like to see my portfolio go down 50%, and I assume you don't also. But there is a difference between timing the market and maximizing long-term investment returns, which is the best way to prepare for whatever might happen in the future. Many see the crashes from the past and would think, OK, now it's the best time to sell everything, say goodbye to investments, and that's it. Well, today the situation isn't much different than 2010-11 in the aftermath of the Great Recession when stocks rebounded and everybody thought, OK, it's up, it's already a next bubble, let's sell everything. 2014 people were selling because of the European crisis. 2015-2016 people were selling because of the expectations that China will slow down, global slow down, oil prices dropping fastly. 2018 December trade wars, again a huge sell-off in the market. However, all of those that sold in those dips and negative times lost a lot, missed out on huge gains because since 2009 the SAP500 is up, what, four times. So, selling is not the answer because you never know what will happen in the future. You need to have a strategy that will give you the best returns over the long-term. And that strategy comprises five points from my perspective. It's not timing the market, it's timing the market. You need to take advantage of dividends, takeovers and inherent normal individual stock price volatility. You need to stay true to fundamentals, focus on earnings. You need to own assets because we have seen what the Fed has been doing lately and what all other central banks have been doing and they will continue to do that to prevent any stock market crash or recession. So, it's smart to be invested. And then, number five, you have to always put all the things out there in relation to what your financial goals are. If you need to retire tomorrow and you need the money, then of course you're not going to invest in stocks. So, let me explain you the strategy I think anyone can apply to maximize long-term investment returns based on those five points. If you invest for the long-term, trying to time the market is extremely costly. Just think of December 2018. The news was mostly bad, trade wars, recession, China slowing down, etc. Many sold during December 2018 and they regret it now. The stock market, the S&P 500, take an example, is up 20%. A similar situation was in 2015. Oil prices were falling, the expectation that China will slow down, global growth will slow too. Many sold in January 2016 and they surely regret it now as the S&P 500 is up 50%. So, selling is not the smart decision. If not based on fundamentals or your personal financial situation, your life goals, which is something we'll discuss in the coming points. Let's see how things pan out numerically. Merrill has calculated how much having investors lost by missing out on the top-performing days. And those top-performing days are usually when most people sell or just after most people sell. Think October 2008 or March 2009. The differences are staggering. An investor with 1,000 invested in 1989 would have ended up with 17,000 by 2018. Just missing the best days, 10 best days would have brought down that investment by 10,000 to 7,000, 20 best days to 3,000. So it's crazy to try to time the market because most probably you will lose a lot on that. Also, same situation from 2009, those that missed the 20 top-performing months in this case, those lost money in the period. Simply, the impact of missing 10 best days on the food sale all share index from 1986, the differences are really, really staggering. Just for missing the 10 days. And you can see how those differences really become meaningful from the volatility in the markets. So over the long term it seems smart to hold on to your investments, but that's just one pillar of successful long-term investments. Let's dig into other four pillars because nobody knows what will happen in the future, especially with stock markets. Stocks go up and down. However, you can find certainty in businesses because that is what you actually own. You own businesses and many of them pay dividends and many of them pay good dividends no matter what. Let's dig into the certain part of investing. So you own businesses, those businesses pay dividends. When it comes to good businesses, even dividends and earnings are fairly predictable. Also growth. There will be ups and downs, slow downs, but over the long term you'll do well. For example, one of my holdings is Gatsprom that currently offers a different yield of 7%. Now let's say that in three years there is a crash of 25% that would hurt, right? But how much would it hurt me? If I reinvest the dividend of 7% in 2023, the value should be 131, assuming the stock price doesn't go anywhere. And then if it crashes, I'll be at break-even after three years, three and a half years in this case. So really over the long term the dividends will beat any risks of stock markets, of stocks crashing. Plus there are business improvements. As I discussed in the video, Gatsprom's management plans to double the dividend over the next years to reach a 50% net income payout. If that happens, the dividend will not be 7%, it will be 14% on the current level. So I would need a 40% crash to break-even in 2023. If they double the dividend, the stock price will probably double too, so I add another 100 from my simple example. So I would need a 73% crash to break-even after those business developments and dividends. So I think that's better to focus on owning good businesses, looking at businesses that will do well over time than to focus on a crash. In life you get what you focus on and I prefer focusing on getting dividends, getting improvements, owning great businesses. Furthermore, if you own a portfolio of 8-10 stocks, there will always be takeovers. So you suddenly find your company up 30-40%, even in pre-crash periods like now, pre-recession periods. And then you get the money from the takeover or from selling diploid somewhere else depending on what is cheap. Number three, from this point, there is so much individual stock volatility that if you just take advantage, in each year you don't have to care about crashes. The thing is that most probably all stocks will see a 40% drop from the highest tick in one year and a 50% jump from the lowest tick in one year. Let me explain. So this is Apple from the bottom price in January 2019 of 142, the stock spiked to 233 in September. That is 64%. So this is what you have to focus in life, not crashes. Stocks will be volatile all the time, your portfolio will be volatile, but you can take advantage of that inherent stock market volatility. If your stock is up 64%, you couldn't care less about crashes. This is also a good introduction into the next point, which is stay true to fundamentals. It's pretty simple. Long-term investment returns will be perfectly correlated with the underlying performance of the fundamentals, of the business, of the earnings. And earnings are cyclical, so it's better to give a cyclical perspective on those. And therefore, it's good to use the cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio that takes into account 10-year average earnings. And you see here from data from Professor Schiller and Starr Capital, the higher is the cyclically adjusted CAPE ratio, price earnings ratio, the lower is the return. So this is simple truth statistics. So you want to be exposed to investments with lower CAPE ratios. The current CAPE of the S&P 500 is 30, therefore, you should expect a 15-year return from the S&P 500 between 0 and 4% per year. What you can do if you're not happy with returns between 0 and 4%, you can diversify it with other sectors or countries. If we look at this map, we see that the highest CAPE is in the United States, but other countries have much lower CAPE ratio, South Korea and Russia has the lowest CAPE ratio that should lead into double-digit long-term returns. Even Canada has a better return than the United States, 7.1%. China is still 10%, I think. So that is a global perspective on CAPE ratio. I prefer to look at individual businesses and then look at those countries. And yes, I am long some Russian stocks, but also, for example, some commodity stocks, as commodity stocks have very low CAPE ratios at the moment and offer 10% and higher long-term returns from the situation. Then the fourth pillar is we have seen last week what the Fed did. They simply plowed a lot of money into the system. The ECB is buying back bonds. Central banks are just pushing money, money, money into the system because they want to prevent a crash and they want to prevent a recession. So there might be a difficult situation, but stocks might actually melt up because the Fed will start buying them like the Bank of Japan is doing in Japan. They simply want things to continue as they are going now. We are living in a financially engineered world. Everything that has been going on over the last 10 years is financially engineered. So you might want to play the game in order to take advantage of it. I know it's smart, it will crash, it is a good message, it is irrational what's going on. But sometimes you simply should not fight the trend. So owning assets, owning great assets that give you, let's say, great limited assets that will go up in price as the Fed pushes more money into the system, give you protection for what might happen. I think there is a 30% chance for stocks to go up, 30-50% over the next years. And I think there is the same or even a lower chance for stocks to go down 30-50% because of the divine, or let's say the Fed's and political intervention that will keep markets up because nobody can afford lower stock markets, lower asset prices. So that's also one thing to keep in mind. It will develop into inflation probably in the long term, as Ray Dalio said. So you want to stay protected, cash is not a good protection. And this also leads to the fourth, fifth pillar of this strategy. It's all about you. I don't know your personal situation. Let me know in the comments or send me an email if you want to discuss this personally. But it's all about you. If you are about to retire, you know you need that money soon, that no investment is smart to do now. Or perhaps you can get a real estate investment where you know that you will get a certain amount of rent that you are happy with. Or some bond, even if I don't like bonds because days are not protected, doesn't protect you from inflation. So really put things into perspective. How can different scenarios impact your life and make a decision based on debt? Let's see. So this is the probable SAP 500 corridor using current fundamentals. So yes, SAP 500 stocks can go to 4,000, 5,000 points over the next years. It's unlikely, but it is possible. But those can also fall to 900 points in the worst case scenario that happened over the last 100 years. However, it is likely that we will see a 0 to 4% return and that in December 2032, the SAP 500 will be at 4,400 points. But you have to think about, OK, how can I handle the SAP 500 at 1,600 points in 3 years? Can I take it from my personal financial perspective? That's my message. I don't know whether a crash will happen tomorrow in 5 years, whether our stocks will be 50% up before we see a crash of 40%. Nobody knows that. That's betting, that's timing, that's speculating. And that's something you don't want to do with your finances. You want as much certainty as you can get, as much fundamentals, as much earnings, as much businesses, as much common sense as you can get. And this is what this channel is all about. So please subscribe, click that notification bell not to miss any videos about common sense investing. If you want to see where I invest, if you're interested in individual stocks with low-cape ratios, with higher expected long-term returns, if you are investing in individual stocks and you have a portfolio of individual stocks, please check my stock market research platform with all my research reports, sector analysis and my portfolios and a clear comparative table of various stocks that I think will do well over time, do so well that you don't have to care about crashes. Thank you. Looking forward to your comments and I'll see you in the next video.