What to Watch (And What to Ignore) When Markets Panic
How to filter signal from noise when everything feels urgent
Government shutdowns. Tariff threats. Market corrections. AI disruption. Your competitors are pivoting, posting, and panicking. Meanwhile, the founders who’ll dominate your market in 12 months are doing something different: they’re ignoring most of it.
The competitive advantage in 2025 won’t go to the founders who react fastest to every market tremor. It’ll go to the leaders who protect their strategic positioning while everyone else burns focus on noise. Most of what’s generating anxiety doesn’t change your competitive battlespace, your resource constraints, or your path to market leadership. But some signals absolutely do—and missing them is how you get blindsided.
This week, I’m breaking down the three lists every fintech founder needs: what to ignore (because it won’t change your competitive position), what to monitor (market shifts that matter but don’t require immediate action), and what to build (counter-cyclical positioning moves that separate you from the pack while competitors retreat). These aren’t new frameworks—they’re applications of the battlespace mapping and resource assessment strategies I’ve been sharing, applied to the current chaos.
Here’s what makes this different: I’m not predicting the future or telling you to time the market. I’m showing you how to use the strategy frameworks you already know—battlespace mapping, resource triage, constraint-based execution—to maintain competitive momentum when everyone else is frozen. The founders I work with who navigate volatility best aren’t the most informed. They’re the most disciplined about where they direct strategic attention.
Today’s Agenda:
🎯 The Ignore List: External chaos that doesn’t change your competitive position
📊 The Monitor List: Market signals that actually affect your battlespace
🔨 The Build List: Strategic positioning moves while competitors retreat
💼 Briefly: Fintech funding collapse, zero-click crisis, budget reality checks
⏱️ Up & coming: Why going quiet beats going viral in volatile markets
💼 Briefly
💸 Fintech payments investment collapsed in H1 2025. After nearly doubling to $30.8B in 2024, investment tumbled to just $4.6B in the first half of 2025—a level not seen in over a decade as investors steered clear of $1B+ M&A transactions. Geopolitical tensions, cost of capital, and tariff uncertainty are driving the pullback. For fintech founders, this means: your competitors with weak unit economics are now running out of runway. That’s your opening. Read KPMG’s Pulse of Fintech H1’25 here.
📉 Zero-click searches hit 58% and organic CTR crashed. New data from Seer Interactive’s November 2025 analysis shows that when Google’s AI Overviews appear, organic click-through rates drop 61% and paid CTR falls 68%. For fintech marketers, this isn’t a future trend—it’s a present crisis requiring immediate strategy shifts. Your SEO playbook needs to expand beyond “rank in Google” to “become the source AI platforms cite.” Read the complete zero-click analysis here.
🤖 AI referral traffic grew 123% but still doesn’t offset losses. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini drove 123% growth in referral traffic from September 2024 to February 2025, but AI traffic still represents only 1.24% of organic search traffic. The good news: early data shows AI referrals convert 4.4x better than organic search visitors, particularly in consultancy-driven sectors like finance and fintech. The bad news: it’s not enough to make up for the zero-click losses. See the AI traffic research study here.
💰 Marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of revenue—but expectations are rising. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets remain stuck at 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from 2024. Meanwhile, 59% of CMOs report insufficient budget to execute their strategy. The response: CMOs are leveraging AI and data analytics to squeeze more from static budgets, with GenAI investments delivering ROI through improved time efficiency (49%) and cost efficiency (40%). Read Gartner’s full CMO Spend Survey here.
🎵 My deep work soundtrack this week: I’m using this specific music protocol to maintain strategic focus when everything feels urgent. No lyrics, consistent tempo, noise-canceling discipline. Watch: Deep Focus Music for Work and Study. It’s not about productivity theater—it’s about building the system to execute your plan regardless of external noise.
⏱️ Up & Coming: The Quiet Advantage in Noisy Markets
The most predictable pattern in market volatility: everyone gets louder. More pivots announced. More hot takes on LinkedIn. More emergency webinars explaining why everything changed. More noise.
Meanwhile, a small group of disciplined operators go quiet—and gain ground.
When your competitors are burning cycles on reactive positioning and public panic, you’re executing the plan you already mapped. You’re using your battlespace assessment to identify the openings they’re creating. You’re applying your resource constraints to make disciplined bets while they’re making desperate ones.
This is where your strategy frameworks matter most. The battlespace map you built doesn’t become obsolete when markets shift—it becomes your competitive advantage. You already know your positioning, your competitors’ weaknesses, and your resource constraints. External volatility requires adjustments, not complete resets.
The founders winning right now aren’t the ones with the best hot takes. They’re the ones maintaining strategic discipline while everyone else loses theirs.
Enjoy my quiet advantage track…
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What you get behind the paywall:
This week’s deep research includes:
The Ignore List: What External Chaos to Tune Out — Specific market signals that don’t change your competitive positioning, with decision criteria for filtering noise from strategic threats
The Monitor List: Market Shifts That Actually Matter — The 3-4 competitive and market dynamics worth watching, with specific monitoring cadence and threshold triggers for when to act
The Build List: Strategic Positioning While Others Retreat — Counter-cyclical market positioning moves, competitive gaps to exploit, and relationship plays that compound during volatility
Each section includes a comprehensive Google Doc research report with implementation frameworks, competitive analysis templates, and the specific positioning strategies our consulting clients use to gain ground during market uncertainty.
Plus: Access to our full archive of research reports, frameworks, and strategic playbooks.
🎯 The Ignore List: External Chaos That Doesn’t Change Your Competitive Position
Most founders fail in volatile markets because they respond to signals that don’t matter. Every reactive pivot telegraphs uncertainty to your market, confuses your team, and hands competitive advantage to the operators who maintain discipline.
Here’s what goes on your Ignore List right now:
Daily political headlines — Government shutdown threats, tariff tweets, regulatory speculation. Unless you’re in a directly regulated business, these don’t change your Q1 competitive positioning. Set a weekly review. Ignore the daily noise.
Competitor funding announcements — Someone in your space raised a round. Unless they’re deploying that capital directly against your accounts or hiring your key people, it doesn’t change your battlespace map. Monitor their hiring and product announcements. Ignore the funding PR.
General market correction headlines — If you’re not fundraising in 90 days and your customers aren’t going out of business, market volatility doesn’t affect your competitive positioning this quarter. Your job: insulate your positioning strategy from macro noise.
AI job replacement anxiety — The articles about AI taking jobs are real. The impact on your market positioning this quarter is zero. Address it once internally, then focus on how you’re actually using AI to gain competitive advantage.
Thought leader hot takes — LinkedIn is full of people explaining why everything changed yesterday. Most of it is noise. Your competitive advantage comes from the battlespace map you already built and the strategy you’re already executing.
The discipline: Apply your battlespace mapping framework. Does this signal change your competitors’ positions? Your resource constraints? Your path to market leadership? No? Ignore it.
In my recent framework on strategy development, I emphasized starting with your battlespace map and resource assessment. That foundation becomes your filter. When external conditions shift, you don’t ask “Should we change everything?” You ask: “Does this change our competitive position, our resource constraints, or our path to the objective?” If the answer is no, it goes on the Ignore List.
🎧 Read the full “How to Do Strategy” framework here
📋 [Access The Ignore List Decision Framework (Google Doc)] — Decision criteria for evaluating market signals, specific examples from fintech/B2B contexts, and the questions to ask before adjusting your strategic positioning based on external events
📊 The Monitor List: Market Shifts That Actually Matter
The Monitor List protects your competitive position. These are the market dynamics that deserve regular attention—not because they require immediate action, but because they determine when to adjust your battlespace strategy.
Here’s what actually matters right now:
Competitor positioning shifts — Are your competitors going upmarket or downmarket? Emphasizing price or premium? Changing target personas? These reveal how they’re reading the market—and where they’re creating openings. Monthly competitive review, documented changes to your battlespace map.
Customer buying behavior changes — Sales cycle length, decision-maker involvement, budget approval processes. If these are shifting, your customers are adjusting to uncertainty. This doesn’t require panic—it requires scenario planning. Weekly review, threshold triggers for strategy adjustments.
Market consolidation signals — M&A activity, company closures, fire sales. These reshape your competitive battlespace faster than anything else. When players exit or combine, territory opens up. Monthly review of competitive landscape changes.
The data supports the urgency here: fintech payments investment collapsed to $4.6B in H1 2025—the lowest level in over a decade. That’s not just a market signal. That’s a reshaping of your competitive landscape. Some of your competitors are now operating on fumes. Others are being acquired. The battlespace is changing.
Resource constraint indicators — Your burn rate, runway, and capital efficiency relative to competitors. In volatile markets, resource advantage compounds. You can outlast competitors who are overextended. Monthly assessment against your constraint-based strategy.
The discipline: Set specific review cadence. Establish pre-defined thresholds that trigger action. “We review X every Monday. If Y happens, we adjust battlespace strategy Z.” No threshold hit, no action required.
This is the same battlespace mapping process I outlined in my strategy framework—applied to volatile conditions. The map doesn’t change every day. But it does need regular review to catch meaningful shifts.
📈 Read the battlespace mapping framework here
📋 [Access The Monitor List Dashboard Template (Google Doc)] — Specific competitive and market metrics to track, recommended monitoring cadence, threshold triggers for strategic adjustments, and the battlespace assessment updates we use with consulting clients to maintain strategic awareness without overreacting
🔨 The Build List: Strategic Positioning While Others Retreat
Here’s the pattern that plays out every market cycle: most companies cut everything. Marketing spend, strategic initiatives, market development—all paused. They survive by retreating. They don’t separate from the pack.
The founders who emerge with strengthened market position are the ones who identify counter-cyclical positioning plays—areas where you can gain ground while competitors pull back.
Here’s what to build right now:
Market positioning and thought leadership — Your competitors are going quiet. Marketing budgets are frozen (Gartner confirmed budgets flatlined at 7.7% of revenue). This is your window to own the conversation in your market. Double down on content, increase LinkedIn presence, get on podcasts. When competitors return in Q2/Q3, you’ll own the positioning they abandoned. This is cheap real estate right now.
Strategic relationships and partnership development — When everyone’s head is down, strategic conversations become easier. Potential partners, channel players, and acquisition targets are more available and more receptive. Build relationships now that become revenue later. Your competitors aren’t doing this—they’re in survival mode.
Competitive territory acquisition — Your battlespace map shows competitor weaknesses. Where are they pulling back? Which markets are they de-prioritizing? Which customer segments are they neglecting? With fintech funding at decade lows, competitors with weak unit economics are running out of runway. This is your opportunity to take ground. Resource-constrained competitors can’t defend everywhere—identify where they’re weakest and move in.
Account penetration in existing relationships — Your current customers are nervous. Your competitors’ customers are nervous. The difference: you’re present, strategic, and stable. This is when you expand within existing accounts and convert competitors’ customers who are questioning whether their vendor will survive.
In my recent piece on leadership lessons from Dan Campbell, I emphasized the importance of “owning the playbook.” This is that moment. Take the playcard. Execute with confidence. Model the discipline your market needs to see. Then the territory is yours.
The discipline: These plays must work even if conditions don’t improve. You’re not betting on recovery—you’re executing constraint-based strategy that gains positioning regardless.
🎙️ Read “Who’s Got the Playbook: Leadership Lessons from Dan Campbell” here
📋 [Access The Build List Strategy Framework (Google Doc)] — Complete prioritization criteria for counter-cyclical positioning plays, resource allocation models for market development during volatility, competitive gap analysis templates, and the specific positioning strategies our consulting clients use to gain market share when competitors retreat
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Stay focused. Stay productive. Keep building.
— Bill Rice
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