I guess many of us will find our risk tolerance in the next crisis, since many (myself included) weren’t investing in 2008 (and the recent corona-crash had a quick enough recovery to have lower psychological effects than seing your net worth drop slowly, then start to recover, only to drop some more).
My default would be a solid and conservative allocation that I can hold through most times. It can be only stocks and bonds or incorporate gold, cash, real estate and even cryptos. I’ll not link again to the Golden Butterfly here but finding a way to adapt it for swiss investors would be a start. No guarantee it will hold through the next crash since we have no idea what the characteristics of the next crash would be.
Regarding stop-losses: they pretty much guarantee that you’ll loose money, but they protect your downside. High volatility may be a problem, and you’d need to also decide when to enter the market again. That wouldn’t be my pick but knowing they’re there may help sleep at night.
Death cross alert: I know of no automatic such alert. I guess some newsletters/subscriptions would offer that service. There’s no guarantee a death-cross would signal a crash and stocks could recover right after with a huge melt-up. Some strategies seem to sucessfully leverage in and out of the 200 moving average, it may be worth investigating if/how you could adapt it for a non-leveraged strategy. My guess is you’d sacrifice upside for some kind of potential downside protection.
Safer strategy: that would be my take. 40/60 is solid enough and up there in terms of risk adjusted returns (with returns in USD, so it would need further investigation/tinkering): http://www.lazyportfolioetf.com/balanced-lazy-portfolios-all-country-world (scroll down to the bottom).
Value instead of tech: I haven’t studied factors but my guess is that most stocks would drop quite a bit in a global crash, though some would recover quicker than others. If it’s the fall that bothers you, I’m not sure I’d go that way.
Keeping cash on the side: my take from the discussions I’ve seen around about the nineties is that it’s very difficult to time a market crash properly and get out of the market in advance without risking it being too early. You’d then face the awful dilemna of staying on the sidelines while stocks keep going up, potentially never daring to enter only to finally give in and do so just before the real crash. I’d not go with this option.
Opening a crypto wallet: in my humble opinion, cryptos have a high likelihood of being at the root of the next crash. There’s no guarantee that they’d hold better than other assets.
The corona-quick-crash had me very bothered with people telling that to market time efficiently, one needs to be right twice (the underlyings I have felt were that one should time the top and bottom near perfectly - which you don’t have to - and that getting back in at an adequate time was the hard part - it’s the easier one in my untested opinion). The market timing experiment I’ve launched on the forum, with which I believe you are familiar, was meant to give myself some basis to enter these discussions once the next crash would come around. I like variations of it more than stop-losses, though it requires a more active eye on the markets.
In short, and as an unexperimented investor who likes reading around:
With a decent chunk of assets, my take would be to use a low volativity portfolio. Less to gain but less to loose and a good history of behaving decently (risk spread among asset classes).
In my own position, with less assets, that I might furthermore need in a crash (but am willing to risk as part of my risk assessment), I’m comfortable with a market timing strategy, which should be studied personally and the person using should feel comfortable with.
My main take being that crashes may occur suddenly, or be delayed, and there’s no sure way to tell before being in the midst of it so our portfolios/strategies should always be ready for such a situation and not be designed for bull markets only.