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A rally is a beautiful thing, particularly when the correction preceding it was embraced enthusiastically. This is the time to harvest your profits — pipe dreams of great wealth and inflated ego aside — jump on those profits before they erode before your disbelieving eyes. If you over think the environment or over cook the research, you’ll absolutely miss the party.

Unlike many things in life, stock market realities need to be dealt with quickly, decisively, and with zero hindsight — and this market reality? No rally in financial market history has ever escaped the ensuing correction. In the real world of investing, most unrealized profits eventually hit the tax return as realized losses

Here’s a list of ten things to do and to think about right now to protect yourself better than you did the last time a correction blindsided you:

1. Your present asset allocation should have been tuned in to your goals and objectives. Resist the urge to increase your equity allocation because you expect a further rise in stock prices. That would be an attempt to time the market, which is, rather obviously, impossible.

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