We find the the Motley Fool web site a great sentiment indicator. It tells us what the retail investor is thinking.
Earlier in the year we got replies like this when we suggested that the bounce in March was likely a last chance to get out of equities:
1 Comments – Post Your Own#1) On March 11, 2008 at 6:22 PM, LordZ wrote:Surprise Suprise Surprise, why am I not surprised your looking to encourage people to get out of the game and sell. Yeah I know your looking to crash the market and try to make a killing shorting the world. Looks like you’ll have to wait at least a week before you start seeing a good opportunity to short. While you were out of the game embracing your cash position I was in the market and I enjoyed a nice 5% appreciation.
This was something of an extreme reply but summed up the overall sentiment nicely. Imagine our surprise today when we scanned a few pages of the most recent blogs on fool.com and around a third were discussing going short!
Quelle horreuer! What has happened to the most reliable “buy and hope” site on earth? If this keeps up people will start criticising Buffet.
If sentiment is starting to swing this far to the dark side it is time to start being careful.
