Investor Sentiment – The Small Retail Investor Is The Last One To Get On The Boat

Once again investor sentiment comes to the forefront as more and more of the small retail investors pile into stocks. Investor sentiment has usually served as a contrarian indicator to the market.

From the Pragmatic Capitalist

The warning flags continue to pop up all over the place and investors continue to run head first into stocks.  None of the recent warning flags are as alarming as today’s huge spike in individual investor sentiment.  Small investor bullishness surged to 45.3% versus last week as the market continues to melt higher.  This has served as a fairly reliable contrarian indicator in the past as small investors tend to pile into stocks near the end of rallies.

Individual investor sentiment has reached levels that have historically been followed by very poor equity returns.  A few of the notable periods when investor sentiment was this high include:

  • A 50% reading prior to a 3 month 10% sell-off in Q2 2008
  • A 45% reading prior to the 2008 market crash
  • A 47% reading prior to the 20% sell-off to the March 2009 lows
  • A 49% reading prior to the January 2010 sell-off

[…] With institutional investors stacking up on the bullish side of the trade and now individual investors stacking up on the same side you just have to wonder – who is left to buy stocks?   Better yet, who are they going to sell to?

There is a nice graph on the Pragmatic Capitalist page showing the investor sentiment.

Saturday, March 13th, 2010 Uncategorized

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Dow Jones Index

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSE: DJI, also called the DJIA, Dow 30, INDP, or informally the Dow Jones or The Dow) is one of several stock market indices, created by nineteenth-century Wall Street Journal editor and Dow Jones & Company co-founder Charles Dow. It is an index that shows how certain stocks have traded. Dow compiled the index to gauge the performance of the industrial sector of the American stock market. It is the second-oldest U.S. market index, after the Dow Jones Transportation Average, which Dow also created. The average is computed from the stock prices of 30 of the largest and most widely held public companies in the United States. The "industrial" portion of the name is largely historical—many of the 30 modern components have little to do with traditional heavy industry. The average is price-weighted. To compensate for the effects of stock splits and other adjustments, it is currently a scaled average, not the actual average of the prices of its component stocks—the sum of the component prices is divided by a divisor, which changes whenever one of the component stocks has a stock split or stock dividend, to generate the value of the index. Since the divisor is currently less than one, the value of the index is higher than the sum of the component prices.
My Zimbio