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Strategies & Market Trends : Classic TA Workplace -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AllansAlias who wrote (163423)	3/2/2008 9:41:20 PM
From: Perspective	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 209892

I second your motion about concern for the sentiment backdrop. However, I think the primary utility of sentiment is when it reflects how people are positioned. And when I compare the sentiment numbers to the way people are positioned, I see a disconnect. Sure, lots of people report being bearish, but are they positioned that way? Bearish newsletter writers may be useful as a windsock, but do they swing any money behind their opinions anymore? In this regard, the AAII numbers are pretty useless. They would have you believe the individual investor was swinging 90% of their portfolio from long to short on every 2% move in the market. Hardly. The options data certainly reflect positioning, but how many of those positions are outright bearish, versus the number that reflect the increasing "sophistication" of the market participants that now use options and shorting against other long positions? As I said before, the charts rule. And after further review today, the charts look pretty universally ugly to me. `BC