In high summer the garden gets crowded. Cats who were nowhere to be seen in February are suddenly on the wall, under the hedge, sitting on my shed roof as though they pay for it. Nobody organised this. Conditions were good for long enough that everyone who could show up, did.

Tuga's behaviour changes when it happens. She doesn't leave — it's her garden — but she stops lounging in the open, keeps her back to a wall, and generally carries herself like someone who expects the arrangement to be tested.

Markets do this, and the crowding is visible well before anything breaks. Not as a timing signal — I want to be very clear about that — but as a reading of how full the room has got.

1. The Markers

None of these is a forecast. Together they describe conditions:

• Attention from people with no interest in the subject. The classic version is a stranger asking you about it unprompted — a taxi driver, a relative who has never mentioned it, a colleague at lunch. It's a cliché because it keeps working: it measures how far the information has travelled beyond the people who follow it.
• Leverage everywhere. Open interest climbing, funding rates persistently positive, liquidation cascades becoming routine. The room is loaded and paying rent for the privilege.
• Quality stops mattering. When things with no users and no mechanism rise as fast as things with both, buying has stopped being discriminating. This is the single most reliable qualitative marker, and it's visible without any data subscription.
• Structural arguments for why it keeps going. Not "it's going up" — that's ordinary — but sophisticated explanations of why the old constraints no longer apply. These arrive near every top, in every market, and they are usually intelligent, which is what makes them effective.
• Lifestyle changes. People quitting jobs to trade. Borrowing to buy. Talking about what they'll do with the proceeds as though the proceeds existed. This one is the most human and, in hindsight, the most damning.
• Promotion from people selling attention. Celebrity endorsements, aggressive advertising, products designed for people who have just arrived. Follow the money: somebody has concluded that a lot of inexperienced buyers are available.

2. Why It Doesn't Tell You When

Here's the part that keeps people honest.

Every one of those markers can persist for a year. They appeared in previous cycles long before the actual peak, and people who acted on them decisively missed enormous moves and then, often, bought back higher — the behaviour gap, executed by someone who thought they were being disciplined.

The markers describe fragility, not timing. A crowded, leveraged, undiscriminating market is one that will fall hard when it falls. It is not a market that falls tomorrow.

Anyone who presents this list as a sell signal is doing the same thing as the models I wrote about: converting a condition into a prediction, which is where the error lives.

3. What It's Actually For

Three legitimate uses, all boring:

• Check your size against your written plan. If the position has grown into a larger share of your wealth than you intended, trimming back to target is risk management regardless of what happens next. You're not calling a top — you're returning to the number you chose while calm.
• Execute the ladder you already wrote. This is exactly what the exit plan was for. Crowded conditions are a reason to follow it, not to improvise a better one.
• Stop adding leverage, and reduce exposure to other people's. Even if you use none yourself, crowded leverage means the next move is amplified. Expect wicks, don't put stop orders where everyone else's liquidation sits, and be sceptical of anything paying yield from someone else's borrowing.

What it is not for: conviction trades in either direction, timing the exact peak, or going to cash entirely on a vibe.

4. The Symmetrical Warning

The mirror of all this is just as costly, and gets written about far less.

Reading the late-cycle markers and permanently leaving is how people miss entire decades. Someone who identified a frothy market in one cycle, sold everything, and concluded they had understood something fundamental is usually still waiting — because the correct read ("this is fragile") got converted into the wrong conclusion ("this is over").

Fragility is not a verdict on the asset. It's a description of positioning, and positioning resets. The thing that makes someone good at this over twenty years is reading the room without mistaking the room for the building.

5. The One Thing Worth Doing Now

Whenever you read this, early or late in a cycle, the useful action is the same and takes ten minutes:

Write down what you'd do if the market doubled from here, and what you'd do if it halved. Both, now, with numbers. Then put it somewhere you'll find it.

That document is worth more than any marker in this article, because it's the only one written by a version of you who isn't inside the moment it describes.

The Point

The summer crowd on the wall doesn't mean anything is about to happen. It means conditions have been good for a while and everyone who could arrive has arrived — and that when conditions turn, there are a lot more cats than there is shelter.

Tuga's response is the right one. She doesn't leave the garden. She just stops lying in the open with her belly up, because she can count, and the arithmetic has changed.