Are you getting the sense that the market is kind of hanging in the air, like Wile E. Coyote right after he goes running off a cliff?

And that the next step might be a long whistling fall, followed by a distant thud and a dust cloud?

Yeah, me too. Look at what's going on. Banks are still playing accounting games, the number of delinquent mortgages just set a new record as the much-ballyhooed "mortgage modification" program looks like a failure, unemployment is still raging, and some seriously respected investors are saying that much of the market seems to have gotten ahead of itself, pricewise.

Oh, and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is making tons of money, which is clearly a bad sign. (OK, not really. But still.)

Clearly, those "green shoots" aren't looking so green -- or if they are, it's the kind of green stuff one used to smell at Grateful Dead concerts back in the day, if you get my meaning. And while I think a big-time return to bearishness is unlikely before Labor Day, once September rolls around, I'm going to be pretty worried.

And that leads me to the hopefully-obvious question: What can we be doing now in anticipation of a possible -- but to be clear, by no means definite -- significant market drop in the near future?

Take a long, hard look at what you've got
Here's what I'm thinking: An awful lot of stocks have had big runs since the lows in March. In many cases, the stocks that have had big runs have been pretty lousy. This may be simply a result of non-failure -- they were priced for bankruptcy and didn't file, and so people jumped back in despite the fact that many of them were priced for bankruptcy for a reason.

As my fellow Fool Morgan Housel noted back in June, some of the rally's biggest gainers -- companies like Dollar Thrifty Automotive , which is now trading around $21, up from $0.62 in early March -- are stocks that, in his words, "you wouldn't recommend to your worst enemy."

Yet, some of the best companies out there have been left out of the market's big run. How fair is it that Dollar Thrifty is a 33-bagger and these stocks are … well, take a look:

Stock

CAPS Rating (out of 5)

P/E

26-Week Gain

% Below 52-Week High

Emerson Electric (NYSE: EMR)

*****

13.9

18.4%

29%

Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)

*****

13.3

10.5%

17%

Novartis (NYSE: NVS)

*****

13.5

10.7%

20%

Hasbro (NYSE: HAS)

***** Continued...