Miami spent years partying on a crypto-fueled high. I went to check out the brutal comedown.

The years of wild partying have ended. I went in search of survivors.

To be successful on Wall Street, you have to be able to recognize the changing market winds — patterns that inform investors when it's time to get in and when they need to get out. Sometimes, the winds are a warm and inviting breeze: Assets rise in value and everyone seems to be making money. Other times, they turn into a violent gale, leaving financial destruction and destitutioniin their wake.

If any city was in the eye of the dramatic weather pattern that seized markets over the past few years, it was Miami. And if any city is the city where you can see just how remarkably things have shifted, it's also Miami. Consider it a financial weather vane perched on the Florida coast.

When I visited Miami in January 2021, the gentle winds of stimulus cash and pandemic-era savings had turned the city into the capital of crypto and a paradise for a new type of too-online stock jockey. But when I returned in January this year, signs of the market's meteorological reversal were everywhere.

Gone are the nearly daily happy hours at beachfront bars where crypto guys in Crocs enthused about the newest coin. Traffic on Miami Beach's sexiest thoroughfare, Collins Avenue, is lighter. The home of the NBA's Miami Heat — which was hastily christened "FTX Arena" after the city signed a $135 million deal with the now collapsed cryptocurrency exchange — has already been renamed the "Miami-Dade Arena." And the gossip around town is that the repo man is coming for recently purchased Mercedes G Wagons — the unofficial status symbol of Miami's newly monied.

Not that the city's longtime residents are rattled by any of this. Miami has been home to many a frenzy — the land grabs of the 1920s, the cocaine boom of the '80s, and the real-estate bust of 2008. Every time there is a boom, the city is invaded. And every time there is an inevitable bust, the carpetbaggers clear. 

The people who are able to really make it in Miami are a lot like the people who make it in the market: steady, clear-eyed, and attentive to the possibility of gale-force winds blowing in from the Caribbean overnight. And those who limp out after the winds shift leave with a lot fewer dollars but a handful of valuable lessons: Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, and sometimes when the sun shines, it burns.