Sentiment Overview: Week Of February 8th, 2008

Published February 8th, 2008 in Sentiment Tags: cboe, Concensus survey, independent advisory services, investors intelligence, lowrisk.com, put call ratio, retail futures traders, sentiment, small speculators.

This past week we didn’t really see any significant change in the usual sentiment measures:

LowRisk.com, which was showing a very lopsided bearish opinion (59%) mellowed out as some bears moved over to the neutral camp, reducing their numbers to 44%. Meanwhile, the bulls remained almost unchanged (38%).

Even less change happened in the Investor’s Intelligence survey with neither bulls (41.6%) and bears (32.6%) really budging from last week.

The Consensus survey continued to drop this week reaching 25%. We haven’t seen this measure this low since the summer and winter of 2004. Just a few weeks ago Consensus bullishness was at 47%.

For those unfamiliar with this survey, a little background: Consensus aggregates the sentiment and recommendation of several hundred analysts and independent advisory services. If I don’t mention it, you can find it each week buried in the bowels of Barron’s.

Although it is now at a multi-year low, during the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks it reached as low as 10%. I don’t think it is fair though to ask that it plumb those depths again in anything but extraordinary market circumstances.

The CBOE equity only put/call ratio back off the Tuesday (February 5th, 2008) high of 0.95 to finish the week at just below 0.80 - elevated levels of concern but not really panic.

The only other noteworthy event is the position of the retail futures traders. But this isn’t really a sentiment measure so much since they have already “put money where their mouth is”. I’ll go into the details for it on Monday. See you then.