Trader’s Narrative

Here is the sentiment overview for the last week of the month (in terms of returns, the worst January ever!):

AAII
The American Association of Individual Investors’ weekly sentiment survey had 47% of respondents bearish and only 25% bullish. That may seem like good odds for a rally… except that we’ve been hereabouts before (in late 2008) and yet the market weakness continued.

Investor’s Intelligence
This week’s II sentiment survey shows the bears at 38% and the bulls at 34.8%. This is a continued amelioration of the exuberance that we’ve seen for the past several weeks, but it still leaves the two camps, more or less, equal to one another.

Fund Flows
Yesterday we talked about the lack of IPOs which are in a sense, supply of “paper” to the market. On the other side stands the fund flows which measure the demand for equities through the purchase or sale of mutual funds.

Not surprisingly, mutual funds have undergone a scorched earth scenario where for more than a year, we’ve hardly seen net inflows:

Source: Data by AMG Data and chart by SentimenTrader.com

Although this data has a contrarian tinge to it, there is nothing bullish about seeing a continuous erosion of mutual fund flows. A sudden and sharp decline is far different than what we are seeing now. Eventually, for the market to be able to find its legs again and push forward, we will need to see people willing to pour billions and billions of dollars into new mutual fund purchases.

Options Sentiment
Neither the CBOE put call ratio or the ISEE call put sentiment ratio are significantly different from last week’s sentiment overview.

The trend in the fund flows data continues. Investors are shunning the US stock market and embracing the international equity markets.

According to AMG Data: for the month of May 2007, domestic funds reported an outflow of $5.2 billion while non-domestic funds report net inflows of $11.6 billion.

For the month of June 2007, domestic funds report net outflows of $4.2 billion while non-domestic funds report net inflows of $9.3 billion.

The only other market which is even close to as unloved as the US is the Japanese market. Every other market, emerging and developed gets some love (aka capital).

While this dovetails nicely with the other data suggesting the retail investor’s apathy towards the US stock market, in the long run it can’t be good. Typically, a bull market starts out with everyone being skeptical and ends when no one is.

But the market needs the participation of the regular guy. Right now we are seeing the “smart money”, commercials falling over themselves to get long. This is a fantastic vote of confidence in the intermediate to long term. But they can’t sustain the market forever.

While sentiment data and my proprietary sheeple index are interesting, they are both circumstantial evidence.

To see what people are actually doing, we have to look at funds flow or liquidity data. The last time I brought this up was last summer when a skittish public started pulling out significant funds as a result of a small correction in the markets. That had panic written all over it and as a contrarian, one would interpret it as bullish since it took very little to scare people enough to have them pull money out.

Right now we aren’t seeing that sort of fear in the market. However, as we have come to suspect from the other evidence (sentiment and traffic data of online brokers), the retail investors are not believers in the US markets. In fact, they are putting money to work everywhere and anywhere except the US markets.

According to AMG Data: Last week, for data including ETFs, investors pulled $1.6 billion out of the US markets and in contrast, sent around $700 million to work in non-domestic destinations. In April domestic funds saw net outflows of -$4.9 billion while non-domestic funds reported net inflows of $20.2 billion.

So while the average investor is shunning the US markets, they are hitting within spitting distance of all time highs. Interesting. Where are they putting their money? In the emerging markets: Asia (except Japan), Latin America (especially Brazil and Mexico), Russia and Western Europe.

In the face of such evidence, I wonder how people can continue to call this market “frothy”? or the price action, “a melt up”?

But although funds flow data is an accurate and meaningful gauge, it must be approached wtih the right time frame. As the example from last summer, it works great when you have a medium to long term point of view. Anything shorter and it isn’t really helpful.

While a bull market requires active participation by the retail investor, today it is the private-equity sector who is the primary force behind the demand for equities. Every day we read about one large deal either rumoured, announced or concluded. My take is that as the market moves higher, the retail investors will ultimately succumb and start to buy stocks again. And finally, as in all cycles, in the later stages we’ll have a real “melt up” and “froth” as the masses rush to invest in a hot market.

But until then, we’ve got a long ways to go.