Is the worst over or is it still to come

[Phaedrus]

How can you position yourself within the current market if you aren't looking to the future?

By making sure that you are in the market when it is rising and out when it is falling. You don't know what the future holds, and you don't need to. Your actions simply need to be in synch with the market. The only certainty is that uptrends (and downtrends) do not last for ever.

No-one can see the future but you can form an opinion based on what you read and hear.

Sure you can - but it is not necessary to have such an opinion in order to invest profitably. What I am describing here is a reactive approach rather than a predictive one.

Wouldn't I be appropriately placed sitting on the fence waiting for the next possible/likely fall within the next 12 months?

There are times when sitting on the fence really is the best place to be - when the market is falling, for example. There are also advantages in fence-sitting if the market has no clear trend..

I am guessing you trade and follow shares regularly so would be in or out quickly if there are any big swings up or down.

In NZ, my activities would be best described as those of an "active investor". I buy NZ stocks for their high dividend yields and hold them for periods ranging from months to many years. I trade other markets more actively.

I don't follow the markets daily and am hoping to be a long term investor buying good companies at the right price.

Buying at the "right price" is not enough. You want to be buying at the right time too. That would be when the stock has fallen and then started to rise again.You don't have to follow the market daily to identify the best time to buy. A quick look once every week or so should be quite sufficient.

The stockbrokers providing me that advice would appear to have been a little too optimistic two years ago.

This is an example of badly mistimed entries. There may well have been nothing fundamentally wrong with the recommendations you were getting - what was wrong was the abysmal timing. Two years ago the NZSX50 was in a very clear well defined downtrend - no time to be buying anything.

The attached NZSX50 chart shows how simply a market can be monitored. It features 3 indicators - trendlines, a moving average and an oscillator. You can see that these all kept you in the market for 5 years when it was rising and got you out as soon as the uptrend weakened and before the market had fallen very far. Similarly, they signalled when to re-enter the market. These are by way of illustration only and are only a very small selection from many indicators that did esssentially the same thing. There are entire threads are devoted to this topic, such as this one.