A useful way to think about this: historical analogies are useful when they sharpen questions, not when they pretend to predict the script. The value of history is rarely in exact repetition. It is in seeing how incentives, leverage and policy constraints rhyme across cycles. That is how the past becomes a decision tool instead of a decoration. Example: An analogy helps most when it tells you what variable to monitor now, not when it tells you to copy a past trade blindly. The mistake is treating similarity of headlines as similarity of market structure. That is the kind of small conceptual habit that compounds into better decisions over time.