Try scaling in slowly & carefully to bear ETFs. Euphoria/sentiment is higher than 1999, when all the buyers are in then look out below. Rydex Ratio, “or the measure of Rydex traders’ assets in bear funds and money market funds relative to their assets in bull funds and sector funds.” As of last week, this ratio fell to its lowest level on record. In other words, these traders are now positioned more aggressively bullish than ever before, including the heady days of the dotcom mania 20 years ago.
Welcome to retirement. We all would like a 3-4% risk adjusted return. But if that were to exist, everyone would hop into it and it would drop to .5%. You did not mention critical issue: Time frame, liquidity, amount and portfolio balances. If it is a small amount you could do teaser rate CDs and roll them. Otherwise what people do is take higher risk on a small portion and the low risk lower return on the bulk to average it out to 3-4%. I assume you are not accredited, in which case getting 8-20% is very possible in private equity. So you are stuck rolling your own solution and spending a lot of time not being a "fool", to which many people will try to "part with your money". Truth is you are probably better off trying to shave 4-5 percent of your overhead expenses and taking no risk in FDIC stuff. Hope that helps.
Sure, many metrics are completely overloaded. Yet I see bears all about that sit in cash waiting. Vix is still in the 20s and volatility targeting is far from max exposure. Main point being, sitting in bear stuff waiting for the house of cards to fall could potentially get very expensive. Admittedly I'm not a great contrarian though.
https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/banking/online-savings/account/ https://www.synchronybank.com/banking/high-yield-savings/?UISCode=0000000 https://www.discover.com/online-banking/savings-account/ https://www.ally.com/bank/online-banking/ many more
True, nobody knows how much further it may go before we see a big sell off. I would not short based only on sentiment or my opinions, I use price levels & start small shorting strong mkts. Near this top, the ET chatter was the Fed would never let the market go down. The day prior to this high the weak breadth hit a historic level, I was ranting about it on ET & shorting the NQ/MNQ. Caught most of this waterfall sell off, took a few small losers in getting positioned on this swing trade which made my year & than some. This is why I use sentiment & internals along with price action & good risk/trade mgmt. .