One way to profit off of a recession would be to purchase an ETF that shorts the market, otherwise known as inverse ETF. Basically, you are betting that the market will go down.
My favorite one, SQQQ, is supposed to deliver negative 3 times the return of the performance of the NASDAQ 100 Index. For example, if a company's value went down one dollar, you would get $3. If it went down $100, you would get $300. There are many other ones that track different stocks and do different things as well. However At the moment it costs about $20 at the time of writing this post and it had a high of $4,885.76 according to Google.
You could also offset the $20 by getting a free stock share on Robinhood using the following link:
Click for a free share on Robinhood
I would definitely consider this a worthwhile potential investment. If you do purchase it, however, don't forget to sell while you are in the green. Then you can buy the opposite, a regular ETF, that will be down in value and you can make money when the stock market is making its way back up in value.
Buy low, sell high.
The one risk, is that this may still have a way to go back down. However, as mentioned, the free share of stock from Robinhood can offset that and for $20 I have taken the risk.
I plan on making a good amount of money from this stock, and I hope you do too :)
For complete transparency, I do receive a free share of stock as well from people who sign up with the link I provided (although you don't have to get SQQQ and I have no affiliation with them). I would recommend others to do what I said with SQQQ regardless of if you use the link or not. However, if you do not have a Robinhood account and you live in the USA I would highly recommend taking advantage of getting a free share.