Market Indicators - Investor Sentiment: Panspar,

» Rande - Panspar,

You could check this old piece from the Street.com -- we've talked about it before. (Maybe you could email Statman at Santa Clara Univ. to see what's available in the way of longer-term historical charts.)

Excerpt:

....The only problem is that the II poll isn't a very good indicator at all. This, according to Santa Clara University finance professor Meir Statman. Statman first took a look at the II poll in 1988. In a paper -- "How Useful is the Sentiment Index?" -- published that year, he and colleague Michael Solt looked at the poll from 1963, when it started, to 1985. They examined
the idea that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would rise when bearish sentiment (the ratio of bears to bulls-plus-bears) rose above 0.52 and that the Dow would fall when it dropped below 0.29. But they found that the "difference between actual realizations and expected realizations does not differ by a statistically significant amount from what would be expected if chance governed the process."

Last spring Statman re-examined the II poll in an article written with Roger Clarke, chairman of Analytic TSA. "We extended the time period through 1995 and found that the passage of time did nothing to improve the forecasting ability of newsletter writers," they wrote. In other words, the II remains about as valuable as, say, flipping a coin.

Coin Toss

-- posted by Rande