Every few weeks a headline shows up telling us the market has done something for only the second time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, and that history says disaster looms. The Motley Fool ran the latest one this weekend, and I want to explain why I read these pieces with one eyebrow raised.

The formula never changes. Find a statistical pattern with a tiny sample size, stretch it back to the 1870s so it feels biblical, then declare that history "says" a crash is coming. Two observations is not a pattern. It's a coincidence with a press agent. Dig through 156 years of market data with enough filters and you will inevitably find some condition that has only appeared twice before, and one of those appearances will happen to precede a bear market. That isn't prophecy. That's data mining with the conclusion written first.

And this is the part I keep coming back to. I've lived through 1987, 2000, 2008, 2020, and last year's wobble. Not once did the crash that mattered get called in advance by a rare historical signal. What preceded those disasters was ordinary stuff: high valuations, investor complacency, and a reason nobody saw coming. The signals that got the headlines beforehand usually fizzled. The Shiller CAPE ratio has been "flashing warning" for most of the past decade, as I noted a few weeks ago, and the market kept climbing anyway.

Now, to be fair to the underlying concern, the market is genuinely expensive. The S&P 500 sits near its highest valuation in history, and I've said plainly that it's priced for perfection. Expensive markets deliver weaker long-term returns from that starting point; that part is real math, not folklore. But weaker returns over ten years and disaster around the corner are two very different claims, and the scary headline only works if it blurs them.

So what should an ordinary investor do with this news? The same thing you did last month. If you're dollar-cost averaging into broad index funds, a doom signal built on two data points changes nothing about your plan. If you're holding cash waiting for the crash these articles always promise, consider that the market could rise another 30 percent before it falls 20, and you'd have been better off invested the whole way. I've watched people sit out entire bull markets because a magazine cover told them a rare signal had appeared.

The boring truth is that patience and consistency beat rare signals over any period that matters. Crashes will come, because they always do, and the investors who survive them are the ones who sized their portfolios so they didn't need to sell at the bottom. That is what 156 years of history actually teaches. It just doesn't make a very exciting headline.

As always, this is my perspective, not professional financial advice. Talk to a real advisor before making moves with your money.