AAII sentiment survey: So what?!

Author: Michael Arold

Covestor model: Technical Swing

Market pundits have been dissecting the latest AAII reading, which has been very high for the bulls.

Contrarians such as Mark Hulbert don't buy the rally for this reason. But if these “experts” would simply pull up a chart, they would quickly recognize, even without advanced quantitative analysis, that high bullish readings did not have any predictive value in the last two years. Click to enlarge:

Even worse: you would have missed the entire 2010 rally, because bullish sentiment came in between 40 and 60 percent during the entire move (see chart).

S&P 500 data: Yahoo Finance

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