If you're taking a long-term view, it would be unwise not to be bullish. Betting against the power of the US economy has always proven to be a poor long-term position. It's highly unlikely that this will change in our lifetimes.
I don't know what the stock market will do next week, next month, or next year. Even five years out, I can't say with certainty it will be higher than it is today (it's highly probable, but not certain). The reality is nobody else in this thread knows. (If they did, they wouldn't be giving away their insights for free on a hockey message board). But over long time frames - twenty or more years - the Dow Jones has never decreased in value.
There's a ton of academic research showing that short-term speculators can't beat the market with any consistency. Aside from the fact that people simply have no idea how to predict short-term movements ("charting", which I've seen references to throughout this thread, has as strong a foundation as alchemy and phrenology) - most short-term traders are faced with transaction fees and taxes that far exceed what a disciplined long-term investor would incur.
Buying and holding is a guaranteed way to get rich slowly. The key word is "slowly". It takes patience and discipline, but if your horizon is twenty or thirty years, it's your best option. Most of my money is in diversified ETF's with minuscule management fees. When I buy stocks of a specific company, it needs to demonstrate several characteristics - a wide economic moat, a history of maintaining/increasing dividend payouts, and a conservative dividend payout ratio. Now is probably a good time to buy since everything is much cheaper than it was a month ago.
I've been investing in the market long enough to know that every time there's a correction, the "this time is different" crowd shows up. There were people who said in 2008 that "this time is different" - that the stock market was shown be a sham, the economy's foundation was faulty, and it would taken decades to recover. It took about six years (before taking into account dividends). People said the same thing in 2001. And in 1987. Unless you think Western civilization will collapse (in which case, money would no longer have any value anyway), this correction will pass - just like all the others before it.
Obviously, this advice isn't for people who need the cash soon. If you're saving for tuition, or saving for a down-payment in a few years, stocks probably aren't your best option. You'd need to protect your capital. But if you were to invest in stocks, buying stable, boring, dividend-paying stocks would be a much better strategy than speculating on put options, in some kind of perverse bet against the same economic system that provides you with your high standard of living.
Most of the advice in this thread is objectively awful. If anybody who's just started their career is reading this, take 10% of your paycheque and invest it in a low-cost, diversified ETF (iShares has many good options - and lest I be accused of having a conflict of interest, I don't own any iShares products). Instead of gambling away your money on trying to do the impossible (guess short-term price swings), you'll be buying a small piece of ownership in active businesses. This advice is boring but, if you stick with it, you're virtually certain to get rich - slowly.