The reasons you quote (extremely low unemployment, solid GDP, someone else mentioned crowded restaurants, etc.) are some reasons WHY I'm bearish. When things are going amazingly well, history suggests the most likely direction is down. Corporate profits as a share of revenue are about as high as they've ever been, while employee wages are near as low as they've been. I hear both political parties making waves about wages, which makes me think wages will rise over the next decade as profits levels fall. Again, stocks are forward-looking, so they anticipate what's likely to happen in the future, not what's happening today. Perhaps I'm too early, but logically, with the economy so good, and the stock market having anticipated tax reform and deregulation (in a big jump shortly after 2016 election) how much better can earnings get? When things are great and expectations are high for continued profit growth, it takes huge surprises to move the market up. But with high expectations, it only takes relatively minor negative shocks to move the market down. On the contrary, I've got this great email I sent to my friends on March 7, 2009 suggesting they buy stocks (or at least don't sell) and a couple of my reasons were that I was still seeing people go to Starbucks, there were no breadlines, etc.
