The general Financial wisdom is to invest in index funds and never touch it, even more specifically the S&P 500 as it has outperformed 90% of all individual stocks in about 85% of all hedge funds and 75% of all asset classes including creating your own business which requires your own work and labor. This is why the S&P 500 is the absolute golden standard for all investments and asset classes, period.
While all of this may be true, there is something that still needs to be considered: When the market valuations are reaching levels of pre Great depression and levels of peak 2007, it is foolish to sit there and pretend like nothing is wrong and just keep passively investing. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. That is true and generally speaking with that strategy you should just keep investing when the market is expensive, however, there is a point where expensive becomes ludicrous. The markets are at the ludicrous level and although they might keep pushing up for another 6 months to 2 years at Max, the coming recession is seeming to be a everything bubble and will likely drop markets by 50% or more and if the government and the Federal reserve try to prevent a 50% decline, The US dollar will devalue dramatically.
In this current predicament, I would not say that it is wise to ignore the ludicrous levels of the market and just keep dollar cost averaging. If you were to buy in 2007 or pre- Great depression you would have been sitting on a almost 20 to 25-year wait to break even inflation adjusted with the S&P 500. And for the Great depression, it was somewhere around 40 to 50 years just to break even. So in essence you are saying that you are willing to take the risk of 20-40 years waiting for the reward of at most 2 years. This is completely insane and is putting your head in the ground ignoring what is going on. According to all the data and statistics that I have seen as a stock trader, it seems that the market is indeed likely to keep going higher for at least 3 months if not 9 months, but somewhere around the 6 to 9 months from now is a very strong sell signal and I would recommend selling everything and swapping into foreign bonds, not US bonds for reasons I can discuss later, as well as gold but keeping in mind that gold does start to drop about mid recession. So when the recession begins you want to sell your gold as it is up and then have the rest of your money and bonds or short positions. After a substantial decline my goal is buy at -20%, then -35% then near -50% is when you can allocate your capital to great growth companies that will have large returns after the recession. Please do not be foolish and ignore the obvious economic and Market signals that are flashing danger for the long term. PS. My average annualized percent gain is 50%. Try getting that in an index fund