The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets. — John D. Rockefeller

The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.

Author: John D. Rockefeller

Insight: There's a counterintuitive truth buried in this old advice about investing: the moments when everyone else is panicking are exactly when opportunity appears. When stock markets crash or industries collapse, prices plummet, but they don't stay that way forever. The people who got rich weren't necessarily smarter than everyone else—they were just willing to act when fear had temporarily erased value from things that hadn't actually changed. The tricky part is that "blood in the streets" doesn't just mean financial crashes. It applies to career moves, business ideas, and life changes. When an industry is in crisis, there's less competition for jobs and partnerships. When a neighborhood is struggling, real estate is cheap. When everyone's pessimistic about something, that's when contrarian bets actually work. But this requires two things most people don't have: capital to spend when they're scared, and emotional discipline to ignore the panic around them. The darker angle worth considering is that this strategy works best for people who already have resources to deploy. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can't exactly buy low when opportunity strikes. But the principle still matters even at smaller scales—the ability to move quickly when everyone else freezes, whether that's switching careers during a recession or starting a side project when your industry is supposedly "dying," often separates people who gain ground from those who fall further behind.

Source: Attributed in The Fourth — And by Far the Most Recent 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said, 1990 by Robert Byrne