Monday, November 06, 2006

Are The Bulls Stampeding?

I know that sounds like a crazy question, but I like to listen to the data.

Let's take three measures of investor sentiment: the polls of the American Association of Individual Investors, Investors Intelligence, and Market Vane. What we find across all three is that more than 50% of survey participants are bullish on the stock market.

Going back to 1987 in all of those polls (N = 1006 weeks; the extent of my data set), we only find 86 weekly periods in which this has been the case.

Three clusters of those occasions fell during August, 1987; April, 1998; and January, 2000. Not exactly great times to be owning stocks.

But here's the really unusual thing: 64 of the 86 weekly periods of unanimous bullishness since 1987 have occurred during this bull market: since June, 2003.

We have never had such a protracted period of bullishness in the surveys in recent history.

Tonight I'll break it down and post my analyses tomorrow AM. Odd that this isn't on the radar for more traders and investors.