The Mother of All Blow-Offs

We didn’t really plan on writing about investor sentiment again so soon, but last week a few articles in the financial press caught our eye and after reviewing the data, we thought it would be a good idea to post a brief update. When positioning and sentiment reach levels that were never seen before after the market has gone through a blow-off move for more than a year, it may well be that it means something for once.

Sloshed as we are…   a group of professional investors prepares for a day of hard work on Wall Street. The tedium of a market that goes up a little bit every day, day in day out, is taking its toll.

Interestingly, the DJIA has fully participated in the blow-off this time, contrary to what happened at the end of the 1990s bull market and the first echo boom that ended in 2007. On the monthly chart, the venerable Dow Industrials Average now sports on RSI of roughly 90, which is really quite rare.

The “slightly overbought” DJIA sports an RSI of 89.59 on its monthly chart in the wake of the blow-off move over the past year.

If you think this looks like the exact opposite of what we have seen at the lows in 2009, you are entirely correct – it is indeed the opposite in every conceivable respect. In 2009 the news were uniformly bad; nowadays, we are flooded with good news on the economy and corporate earnings. In 2009 stocks were cheap  – if not really historically cheap – now they are in many ways at their most expensive in history, particularly if one considers the median stock rather than just the capitalization-weighted indexes.

Singing From the Same Hymn Sheet

We recall that the reading of the Daily Sentiment Index of S&P futures traders stood at just 3% bulls on the day of the March 2009 low. Looking at sentiment data today, there are probably 3% bears left. What prompted us to take a closer look at the data was an article at Marketwatch about the positioning of Ameritrade customers – in other words, self-directed retail investors. The article is ominously entitled “Retail investor exposure to stock market is at an all-time high”. An all-time high? Isn’t this supposed to be the “most hated” bull market ever? That hasn’t been true for quite a while actually. Ameritrade helpfully provided a chart of its “Investor Movement Index” (IM Index), which measures the aggregate stock market exposure of its clients.