After several years defined by disruption, windfall profits and extreme volatility, the container shipping industry is entering a more familiar, and more challenging, phase of the cycle. For investors, the next 24 months are shaping up as a period where fundamentals matter again: supply-demand balance, pricing power, cost discipline and balance sheet strength. This transition has important implications not only for freight markets, but also for the credit quality of the world’s largest shipping operators.

Taking the market’s pulse, assessing financial health, diagnosing excess stress: the language of finance often borrows from medicine. The comparison is not superficial. Both disciplines rely on structured observation, informed judgement, risk assessment, and calibrated intervention.

In 1993, NVIDIA had roughly 90 days of cash left after its first chip flopped. Jensen Huang and co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem scrapped the original architecture and pivoted towards building a graphics chip designed specifically for PC gaming. That near-death decision eventually turned the struggling company into one of the greatest wealth creators in public market history.