US Stock Market: Bullishness At A Contrarian Extreme

As a long-time student of the markets, I’ve learned that traditional “fundamentals” don’t always tell the full story. For me, at least, it’s also important - essential, actually - to take technical, sentiment, and macro factors into account when trying to figure out which way prices are headed.

That doesn’t mean I always get it right. In fact, I’ve had more than my fair share of bad calls, especially when it comes to the shorter-term outlook. Regardless, I’ve found that my odds tend to improve when the aforementioned elements are all pointing in the same direction.

With that in mind, the following chart (courtesy of Elliott Wave International) and remarks by Tim Knight, from a post at his Slope of Hope blog (another long-time favorite of mine), entitled “Some Insights from EW,” suggest that bullishness has reached a contrarian extreme:

The [following] chart shows the perverse relationship sentiment has with stocks. In early March, when stocks were a ridiculous bargain and multi-thousand percentage gains were just waiting to be plucked, the sentiment reading was an unheard-of 2% bulls.

Now, however, with stocks at (in my opinion) insanely-overpriced levels, and with all those multi-thousand percent gains already part of financial history, people are ga-ga about stocks.

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