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Pastimes : The Justa & Lars Honors Bob Brinker Investment Club -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kirk © who wrote (6639)	7/8/1999 12:01:00 AM
From: marc ultra	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 15132

Kirk re<<<<In other words, I don't think the bulls/(bulls+bears) ratio is as useful as it used to be as too many are using it and probably distorting the numbers.>>>>>> Kirk, I agree this is an issue and have raised it earlier in a more clumsy manner. If bullish sentiment gets extreme this feedback would tend to then make timers less bullish(or bearish as the case may be) since so many have this as a contrary indicator whether basically a fundamentalist or pure technician. This would though I think tend to be artificially pushing bullish sentiment down from extremes so an extreme bullish reading especially on a 4 week moving average may be even more impressively important as a contrary indicator than ever. While sampling error would be large as you point out I think one of the reasons a 4 week moving average is used by many including Bob may be that with a monthly newsletter coming out on different times of the month the four week moving average should at least assure all advisors are included though representing somewhat differences in the precise time of their opinion. Also I think weekly or daily hotlines are becoming more the norm and while I know Hulbert simply tries to follow the advice on an as given basis in his evaluation I don't think Investor's Intelligence does more than simply report the monthly letters as they come out but I'm not sure. Anyway the bottom line is that sentiment number at extremes should still be an important contrary indicator and maybe next week when we may be looking at a somewhat different set of advisors it will be interesting to see what it says. I would also note the P/C ratio in CBOE equities has shown extreme and sustained bullish sentiment and shows what investors are really doing not what some letter writers are writing though I' sure this has its own imperfections but again as we know Bob uses several measures in his sentiment indicator. Marc