The headline should be: Institutional and professional investors are going into cash resulting in individual investors that buy ETF's share to go up to 50 percent.
When professional will start shorting and going the other direction. Headline will be: 80 percent of falling US assets are now invested in index funds.
> Meet Bob.
> Bob is the world’s worst market timer.
> What follows is Bob’s tale of terrible timing of his stock purchases.
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...
Most people are not investing for 'fun', but rather for retirement. So "never" selling, or at least not-selling for several decades, is actually a reasonable assumption.
The main problem is that the general public read headlines and see "Markets Are Crashing!!1!" and pull out. Whereas if they could keep their cool a bit, and stay invested (and ideally keeping investing (monthly?) on the way down), they'll generally end up okay when they approach retirement.