Meme coins aren't the place to keep your hard-earned cash when it looks like the market is about to get (potentially extremely) turbulent due to a toxic cocktail of geopolitical factors.

If you hold a little Dogecoin (DOGE -1.88%) or Shiba Inu (SHIB -1.25%) for fun, that's fine. But, if you hold them with any appreciable amount of capital, it's been time to run for the door for a while now. Here's why.

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Dogecoin's issuance is a permanent headwind

Dogecoin's supply has no ceiling, and new coins enter circulation continuously. Thus, long-term holders need a constant influx of fresh demand to offset this dilution.

It's unclear what would generate that demand on a normal day, as the coin has no utility, and there is little hope of ever changing that fact. And on a day when the market is struggling for whatever reason, the picture looks even worse.

Now, imagine how Dogecoin will perform when investors are fleeing risky assets toward ones that they perceive to be safer -- for example, when things look shaky on the world stage -- and you'll get an idea of how dangerous it is to be holding this coin right now.

Shiba Inu is just as bad

In one sense, Shiba Inu has a tiny leg up on Dogecoin in the sense that its community emphasizes coin burns as a means of controlling its supply, and it also has a (very limited) ecosystem.

But burns require someone to buy tokens and destroy them, or for decentralized applications (dApps) to regularly burn them automatically, neither of which is guaranteed to occur on a continuous basis. And that's especially true considering the Shiba layer-2 (L2) chain, the Shibarium, is barely used for any purpose, with just $2 in chain revenue on Jan. 20.

So sell these dog coins, stat. They're not going to fetch you anything valuable.