Bar, While it's extremely hard to pick major tops and bottoms, there have been some exceptions. The 2020 crash was very predictable, and you could see it coming because of the global trajectory of Covid's spread. I got out of most stocks within 1 day of the top. But that's unusual to have a warning like that. By Jan/Feb you could see what was coming.
More often the market will just keep climbing, getting more and more expensive, like a balloon inflating, and that can go on a lot longer than investors expect. You can watch the overvaluation via metrics like the Buffett Index and realize that things are way overvalued, but it might take an external event to get the reversal going.
Right now the Fed/Treasury are so committed to keeping things going that the odds of a new bear market seem very slim. Theoretically they can keep the liquidity/life support flowing for years, until there is a global loss of faith in the US dollar.
There are other factors at work however. They know the dollar reserve system is due to be replaced (SDRs), and that has been the longer term goal. The big question is the timing, and the nature of the transition. Ideally they'll organize an international 'Bretton Woods II' and agree to the new global arrangement, as opposed to waiting for the US dollar system to unravel in a big crisis.
