Another day, another doom headline. This one says the market is flashing a warning signal seen only once before, back near the dot-com peak, and that history is telling investors to act now. You can read the full piece here.

I've written about this general neighborhood before, because valuations have been sitting at dot-com-era levels for a couple of weeks now. I wrote on September 7 that I'm not predicting a crash, and I'm still not. What interests me about the 'seen only once before' framing is what it quietly leaves out. The dot-com peak arrived in March 2000, but anyone who sold in 1996, when the warnings first started, missed four years of extraordinary gains. Signals tell you risk is elevated. They have never told you when.

So what does history actually say to do? Mostly boring things, which is why they don't make good headlines. Keep buying on your schedule. Keep your stock allocation at a level you can hold through a bad stretch without flinching. Rebalance if you've drifted. And if you're sitting on a pile of cash waiting for the dip, understand that the dip you're waiting for may arrive at a level higher than today's price. That one catches people every single cycle.

A small piece of arithmetic worth internalizing. If a 30 percent correction comes and you're dollar-cost averaging into a broad index fund, your next purchase buys shares at a 30 percent discount to today. If you're fully out of the market, a correction just confirms your fear, and you'll find a reason not to buy then, too. I watched it happen in 2008 and again in March 2020. The people who suffered most weren't the ones who stayed invested. They were the ones who went to cash at the bottom and stayed there for years, waiting for certainty that never came.

Is this time different? Expensive markets can stay expensive, and cheap ones can get cheaper. Nobody knows, including the people writing these articles and including me. The honest position is that elevated valuations raise the odds of disappointing returns over the next decade, and they say nothing useful about the next twelve months.

I keep buying my index funds every month. Same amount, same day, regardless of what the Shiller ratio is doing. That's not complacency. It's the recognition that in forty years of doing this, the only signal that ever paid me reliably was the one that said keep going.

As always, this is my perspective, not professional financial advice. Your situation deserves more than a headline.