First off, this is not financial advice. I am not an expert.

Whatever you do, make sure every dollar you invest into anything is a dollar that you can live without. I never invest any money that I could not lose. In fact, as soon as I invest, I consider the money "lost".

Here are my (messy) thoughts.

If you have any credit, try to pay off as a much as you can. Car. House. Stuff like that. Interest rates are falling, but only very slowly. If you think you can beat the interest rate on credit by investing, then of course, go for investing. Also, I think the world will be in a better, more stable place, as soon as Donald John Trump takes office, which could reduce the likelihood of wars and crashes. However, perhaps you should consider spending some money on making sure you can survive hard times. Canned goods. Armament. Munitions. Physical gold and silver. Razors. Toothbrushes. Lighters. It's stuff like that that were very valuable during for instance the war in Yugoslavia.

Now, if you are adamant to invest; It all depends on your situation. If you have young children, you can do long-term investment reducing risk. If you want to take more risk, you should really time entry right. I am not sure a crash is coming, but certainly there are bubbles. Depending on where you live, obtaining a secondary property could work for you. In some countries, there are many plots of land next to cities that will be developed within the next 10-30 years. Those offer very real possibilities of high returns.

I have always liked investing in commodities, because I found it easier to think about their price dynamics. For instance, there appears to be a mismatch between the prices of gold and silver. Some people claim silver is priced too low. Others claim gold is too high. I think gold and silver are always good investments, certainly long-term. If at all possible, physical gold and silver are good options.

A few years back, I invested in oil right before Russia invaded Ukraine. Also wheat and corn. Those were good investments, but timing your exit is difficult. I have also noticed that cocoa has a fairly obvious seasonal price swing, but overall pricing depends very much on the size of the harvest (weather). I found it difficult to get good returns on it. I think it is best to observe for a long while, before entering with small amounts.

When it comes to crypto, I am weary. I have been mining my own for a few years with good returns, but then completely stopped as energy prices went crazy where I live. We have seen BTC crash and then regain value. It is now priced high, but may it still be undervalued? ETH is no longer mineable. I haven't even looked into how staking works... Trump has said he will make sure the US government will buy X amount of BTC and stable coins such as XRP. Will their prices go up? Probably yes. Will people cash in at some point? Probably yes.

I have, in the past, invested in anything to do with the "energy transition"; I am not a fan of it, but in market terms, interesting things were happening, at least for a while. I put money into lithium mining corps. That got a bit of a return as well, but since then I think we have passed the lithium-bump and the future of battery tech is in solid state batteries. I think I should really invest a few thousands into those companies. Solid state batteries hold more energy, are more stable and are not affected by temperature as much as lithium-ion batteries, so as soon as production ramps up, I think they will displace much of the lithium-ion batteries, especially and firstly in the EV-market. This may even make EVs a viable mode of transportation, which, in my opinion, right now, it isn't.

Companies like nVidia, Intel and AMD are always safe bets to maintain value, but Intel has suffered from disastrous CPU-sales as their latest two generations appear to show catastrophic deterioration of the silicon, making the CPUs go bad within a few years. This has motivated consumers to move over to AMD. AMD is doing well. However, Intel have recently launched a new line-up of GPUs that have a superior performance per dollar compared to AMD. I think Intel could recover somewhat. The price of nVidia stock is very much linked to AI; as soon as that bubble bursts, I think nVidia stock will go down.

When it comes to Meta and Google, I am skeptical; Google is under threat of being broken up (a good thing). Sometimes your own opinion about a company should certainly determine your willingness to invest in said company. I find Alpha/Google completely uninteresting. Meta put all its money into the Metaverse; An idea which has since died. I think they will find it hard to come up with something new. The new thing is obviously AI. Google is doing well in that regard. Meta may follow. Both companies just are not to my liking and I refuse to invest any money into them. Apple is a dud in my opinion. They seem to have lost their innovation power. They VR-stuff is very limited and very much overpriced.

With regard to the general market. We may face a crash still, but I think the crash we will see will mostly be limited to AI. The AI-bubble has been going on for a while. As much as the consumer-applications of AI seem to be great (chatGPT, audio, video), people are getting kind of tired of AI's products and no one is going to pay for AI-generated content. It is a gimmick. I for one have completely stopped watching AI-voiced content. Authenticity is key; I appreciate natural speech with all its flaws. I think in this regard, I am weary of investing in AI companies. There are simply not enough business models that can even work in theory, let alone in practice.

Apparently, China is not doing so well. China has of course had very real problems in the housing market. They can't really make good gas-powered cars, but their EVs are doing well. However, I think we have already passed the EV-bump as subsidies and thus reality, has been setting in. Now, what would happen to the world economy if China's economy crashes? I am not sure. Would we see a limit to the flow of cheap consumer goods going to the West? I don't think so. Could we possibly see a revival of production of such goods in the US? Maybe.

PS: Forget about Microsoft as well. Windows 11 is making a lot of people move to Linux.