Monday, January 04, 2010

Reflections On Market Sentiment

Trader's Narrative has some interesting charts and commentary about market sentiment
http://www.tradersnarrative.com/sentime ... -3415.html
which suggests a great deal of bullish complacency among the bulls and resignation for the bears.

Here is one of the charts from the article.



Both of the popular weekly sentiment surveys are in agreement showing an extremely bullish mood, which should make any contrarian stand up and take notice. It now stands two standard deviations below its 1 year average. The AAII weekly sentiment survey of retail investors in the US has only 23% bears and a whopping 49% bulls. The AAII ratio hasn’t been this lopsided since May 2008 when the S&P 500 topped out at 1440.

Similarly, the Investors Intelligence survey of newsletter editors has plumbed new depths from last week and reached a new record. We haven’t seen this few bears in 22 years! The II finished off the year with only 15.6% of editors looking forward to lower stock market prices and 51.1% optimistically looking forward to the continuation of the rally.

The keepers of the Investors Intelligence survey, Mike Burke and John Gray, believe that while “some additional gains may occur in the near term, stocks may peak in the first quarter of next year and correct from there.â€