Sunday, July 11, 2010

Can This Rally Go Any Higher?

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I really have to apologize for the appearance of this chart.  Please bear with me and look carefully at the details.
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The stock market, we know, moves from one emotional extreme to the other.  Fear to greed back to fear then greed, and so on.
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And a good stock trader should always be asking him/herself, are we at an extreme and if so, which one?
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This chart is my attempt to communicate that we are at an extreme in sentiment.  And it turns out that the extreme at this time is FEAR, not greed.  
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The lower chart is data from Investor's Intelligence and graphically measures their weekly readings of bullish and bearish investment advisors.  Investor's Intelligence has been around a long long time and their data is highly respected.  Their data is also great for taking the contrarian viewpoint i.e. if people are too bullish, contrary is to think the market is going to go down, not up.  
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In our current situation, people are too bearish and contrary is to think the market is going to continue going up.  In fact, despite the terrific rally, the data shows that an even great percentage of folks became bearish this week than the previous week.  
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That tells me people do not believe in this rally and to think contrary to the crowd, this rally then has all the ingredients it needs for SUCCESS.
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Click on the chart to ENLARGE
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Here is another way to observe the timeless pendulum swing of human emotion.  This is a chart of the Put/Call ratio of Equities from 2005 to the present.
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What I have done is identify the price of the SP-500 at the major peaks and bottoms.  Notice how the bottoms are always highs in the stock market.  Notice how the peaks are always lows in the stock market.
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The pendulum rarely swings more than .20 in one direction or the other.  We now have swung about that far from the previous bottom and appear to be deciding where to go next.  My feeling is that the pendulum should now swing downward and thereby pull stocks upwards.
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Click on the chart to ENLARGE

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