Thursday, September 12, 2013

A Jump In Bullish Investor Sentiment

Investors seem to have a heightened focus on the short term market movements during this bull market advance that began in 2009. Nonetheless, I will perpetuate this line of thinking by detailing this week's investor sentiment figures released earlier today by the American Association of Individual Investors. For the week individual investor bullish sentiment rose nearly ten percentage points to 45.52% from the prior week's reading of 35.53%. A majority of the increase is attributable to the decline in bearish sentiment to 24.58% from 31.25%. This widened the bull/bear spread to 20.9% from 4.3% in the prior week.

From The Blog of HORAN Capital Advisors
Source: AAII

Sounding like a broken record, but there are events on the horizon that could trip up this market advance: the Syria issue, Fed tapering, the debt ceiling debate, just to name a few.

Interestingly, it seems money market pundits were focused on the historically poor returns that have been generated in the month of September. With nearly half the month past, the S&P 500 Index is up over 3% through the end of today. As we noted in an earlier post though, when August is a down month for the S&P 500 Index (down 2.9%), the odds favor (ever so slightly) that September will be an up month. With two weeks remaining, the bulls will have their work cut out for them in order for September to finish in positive territory.


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