from The Big Picture: http://bigpicture.typepad.com/
How Bullish is the Investing Public?
in Psychology/SentimentWe previously mentioned how Bullish the Pros were; What about the investing public -- how Bullish are they?
At least when measurd by a particular sub group -- over 5,000 online WSJ readers -- the answer is "Very" :
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via WSJ
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While I see a lot of anecdotal chatter about this, and prefer to stick with more quantitative data. Too many people say “All my colleagues/friends/brother-in-laws are _____. That’s meaningless.
The Business Week survey reveals one group of bullishness (Strategists). When I made my guess, I never figured I would be the outlier to the downside. Without thinking much about it, I assumed I would be in the bottom third, or even quartile.
Silly me.
Other surveys reveal a similar Bullish bend. The WSJ poll (over 3,750 people) show 46% expect the same thing as the market gurus: between 11-12k. Another 12% think we end up at more that 12,000. About 22% expect to end 2006 unchanged. Only 9% think we will see the Dow between 10,000-10,500 – a mild correction of less than 10%. A little more than one in 10 persons (11%) think the Dow will drop below 10,000.
The one anecdote I will mention is television bookings: Why is it I see the same few Bears on CNBC? The bookers I speak with tell me there are far fewer Bulls than Bears.
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Bottom line: Both the pros and the amateurs are moderately Bullish.
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