Singapore-based investing educator Adam Khoo has used his latest YouTube essay to take a sledgehammer to the perma-bear narrative dominating finance social media, arguing that the long-promised crash has already come and gone three times in a decade and that retail investors who keep waiting on the sidelines are quietly destroying their own retirements.
Khoo, the founder of Piranha Profits, opened with the same question retail investors keep asking each other on every new high. "Have you been waiting on the sidelines with all your cash, waiting for the next big stock market crash that you've been promised? Well, I got news for you. It's already happened."
The framing matters because, in Khoo's read, US equities are not climbing on hope or liquidity but on numbers. He pointed to the current quarter as the proof.
"Effective earnings of the S&P 500 companies are coming in at a 27.1 per cent growth rate. That is the main reason why the market has rebounded so strongly," Khoo said. "Company's profit margins are at the 15-year high. Simple reason."
That backdrop has not stopped the doom merchants. Khoo named names. "Just April this year, you've got Harry Dent saying that how the everything bubble will finally burst. And then also on the 2nd of May, a few days ago, top economist Gary Schilling says a recession and a deep stock market plunge are likely by the end of the year."
He did not spare them. Khoo argued Dent has been forecasting a crash 'almost every year', going back to 2008. "He said the market would crash in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017. Every year they say the big crash is coming. And a broken clock is right twice a day. If you stayed invested, it would have compounded your wealth by 790 per cent over the last 16 years."
The retail trap, in Khoo's framing, is that the prophets are mathematically correct often enough to get listened to and structurally wrong often enough to bankrupt their followers' retirements. "The market goes up through the ups and downs, the value of their cash depreciates because of inflation. And 10, 20, 30 years from now when they can't work anymore, they cannot retire because their wealth was not able to grow to beat inflation."
Khoo then conceded the apparent contradiction baked into his own thesis. "The market is rigged. The market is rigged in your favour. The market is rigged to always go up. Why? Because collectively, businesses will always grow their earnings over time and their value will always increase."
Crucially, Khoo argued the crashes investors have been told to expect have already happened, three of them, just inside the last decade.
"In the last 10 years, we had more crashes in 10 years than we do in other 10-year periods," Khoo said. "We had a bear market in 2020. That was COVID-19. There was a bear market. The market dropped 35 per cent. That was a crash. And then in 2022, we had another bear market where the market crashed 27 per cent. And then just last year in 2025, thanks to Trump waging tariff war on everyone, we had another almost bear market. Three bear markets in 10 years. Normally, you get a bear market every six years."
The reason recent crashes have been faster and shallower than the 1929, 2001 or 2008 episodes, Khoo argued, comes down to three structural changes: an aggressive Federal Reserve toolkit, the speed of information flow on social media, and high-frequency trading. "Today, the Fed is your friend. They will not allow the market to go down as much as in the past and to not stay down for very long. So the market's rigged for us, who stay invested, who take advantage of these crashes."
He drove the point home with the compounding maths. "If you had just stayed invested through the ups and downs and ignored the news, the prophets of doom today, despite these three major crashes, you would have gained 311 per cent in terms of your wealth compounding. If you had added during the crashes where you bought the dip, you would have made even more, four, five, six, seven hundred per cent in the last 10 years."
The video lands as the S&P 500 trades at fresh all-time highs and Schiller PE sits at its second-highest reading on record, with YouTube finance hosts Graham Stephan and Peter Boockvar publishing competing 'meltup' and 'splintering Mag 7' takes the same week.