Investing is an exam where the subject keeps changing. Some days it becomes literature, and narrative is what counts. Other days it becomes math, and fundamentals are what counts. And every so often it becomes a dodgeball game with no logic to it at all, the ball simply flying at wherever people are bunched together.

That is what the recent crash was. Leveraged bets had piled up too heavily on one side, leaving the market brittle, primed for liquidations. A math test that had been running on solid earnings turned, one morning, into a vicious game of dodgeball. Math skills don’t help you in dodgeball. However good your earnings are, if the ball hits you, you’re out.

The player named as throwing hardest is Citadel, the American mega-fund. Last week the hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner failed to meet a margin call on roughly four times leverage, and handed almost all of its listed holdings to Citadel at fire-sale prices. This was days before his own wedding. As it happened, the moment news of the liquidation broke, every stock he had been forced to disgorge jumped 20 to 30 percent. The instant he was dragged off the court, the barrage stopped.

Aschenbrenner graduated top of his class at Columbia at nineteen, and true to that, he had rarely gotten a question wrong on the investing exam. He had picked out compelling companies early, on both the math of fundamentals and the literature of narrative, and in under two years his fund grew its assets nearly a hundredfold. In the first half of this year alone it returned over 400 percent. But even he did not see the moment the subject switched to gym class. Nor that the reason it switched was to hunt him.

On a dodgeball court, the ball goes to the most visible player. Aschenbrenner’s investment philosophy had been published in a report. His positions were disclosed in filings. Even the rumors of his leverage were everywhere. Bad news and short interest concentrated on the names he held most. And at the point where losses had mounted and a margin call was in sight, Citadel put out a report predicting a surprise rate hike from the Fed — the finishing blow. Whether any of this was a designed hunt, of course, no one can know. What is certain is that all of us are sitting in an exam room where a hunt like that is possible. In this particular match, Korean retail investors were the shrimp caught between fighting whales. Forced liquidations of leveraged positions in the Korean market passed two trillion won between the end of May and the end of July.

Nobody can say precisely when the subject will change, or how long the current one will run. Fortunately, this exam has one rule that never changes: the subjects always come back around. Dodgeball does not go on forever. So for an individual investor with no power to set the terms, the best strategy is to wait until the subject you studied for comes back.

The heart of that is the waiting (the investment of time). However right your direction was, a strategy that cannot wait will not survive the rotation. That is exactly why leveraged products are dangerous. With luck they widen your gains, but when the subject turns out not to be the one you prepared for, they widen your losses past what you can carry. Investing with debt you can service and investing in leveraged products are entirely different things. One slip in the second and you face margin calls and forced liquidation. Aschenbrenner knew the answers to the next math test. He just wasn’t in the room on the day it was given.

So however the subject changes, what matters most is surviving well enough to keep showing up and sitting the exam. Just as there are days when every answer you guess turns out right, a few chances to get rich will find anyone over a lifetime. But holding onto that chance instead of blowing it in one shot, keeping the wealth you’ve protected, and staying in position for the next one — that is not something everyone manages. Getting rich is a question of grades. Staying rich is a question of attendance. We’ll be doing this our whole lives anyway, so aim for the investing that lets you stay rich, not the investing that makes you rich.