Trader’s Narrative

Everyone these days pays at least some attention to sentiment. Which means that the usual sentiment indicators run the risk of becoming saturated with attention, and therefore less effective.

Which is why I love finding novel ways of measuring sentiment. One that I’ve already written about is the “sheeple index” which is a measure of retail broker’s web traffic.

Another indicator is to measure the level of interest that people have in specific internet searches. For example, using Google Trends, we can see a history of people searching for “stock market crash”:

Since people would have to be really bearish to even think of typing in such a search string, it may have value from a contrarian point of view. As you can see each time there was a spike high in the number of searches for “stock market crash”, it was a great time to actually go long!

And here’s the chart for the keyword: “subprime”:

Again, note that the two spike highs correpond to intermediate bottoms in the market.

What about you? Do you have an unorthodox way of measuring market sentiment?