Talk about a schizophrenic market. Just two weeks ago the sky was falling. As sentiment plummeted the excessively fearful shorts were caught flat footed and an impressive short covering rally ensued. Now, just a few economic reports and a brief rally later small investors are convinced that there are no risks coming down the pike. The AAII’s bullish sentiment survey showed a remarkable rebound in recent weeks. After hitting 21% just two weeks ago the percentage of bullish investors has surged to 43.9% – the highest reading since April 15th when sentiment hit 48.5% and just days prior to the Q1 market peak. AAII elaborated on the results:
“Bullish sentiment of individual investors rose 13.1 percentage points to 43.9% in the latest AAII Sentiment Survey. This is the most bullish individual investors have been on the market outlook six months forward since bullish sentiment reached 48.5% on April 15, 2010. The historical average is 39%.
Over the last two weeks, investor sentiment has swung from bearish sentiment outweighing bullish sentiment by 28.7 percentage points to bullish sentiment outweighing bearish sentiment by 12.3 percentage points.
Bullish investors predominately mention that pessimism seems to have reached an extreme which should favor stocks going forward–the sky is not falling.”
The Investors Intelligence survey also showed a rebound in sentiment as bullishness jumped to 33.3% from last week’s reading of 29.4%. Although there has been a slight rebound in this data it is not at the same extremes seen in the AAII data.
Source: AAII, II
Mr. Roche is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Discipline Funds.Discipline Funds is a low fee financial advisory firm with a focus on helping people be more disciplined with their finances.
He is also the author of Pragmatic Capitalism: What Every Investor Needs to Understand About Money and Finance, Understanding the Modern Monetary System and Understanding Modern Portfolio Construction.
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