It’s September and the trading is easy, investors are jumping and the Dow is high. CNBC showed some interesting sentiment stats this morning. The latest results of their All-America Survey revealed that investor sentiment for the first time in five years is higher and on the rise in conjunction with the Dow’s rally. Steve Liesman as usual makes a great presentation, but I was surprisingly impressed with a salient point made by Simon Hobbs. In his finest Queen’s English he conjectured, “The Perfect contrarian indicator, I would have thought.” 
From the chart that aired on CNBC it looked like about 60% of investors now believe it is a good time to invest in the stock market, up from well under 50% recently. Other contrary sentiment indicators are elevated as well. Investors Intelligence Advisors Sentiment has 44.3% advisors bullish, 20.6% bearish, and 35.1% correction. Weekly CBOE Equity Only Put/Call is rather complacent at 0.57. Consensus Bullish Sentiment is 60%. Perhaps the least frothy of sentiment indicators we follow is AAII’s Sentiment Index with 36.1% bullish, 33.3% neutral and 30.9% bearish. Market Vane Bullish Consensus is 62%.
Overall as you can see sentiment is rather mixed and not at any clearly indicative extremes, yet predominately bullish and neutral. Several other factors continue to have us remaining in our cautious stance.
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