American Association of Individual Investors

Good contrarian indicator.

It's the AAII bulls versus bears.

And so Isabel Nett put this out.

U.S. retail optimism is fading fast.

The AAII, which is the American Association of Independent Investors, bull bear spread has been negative in the 25 of 37 weeks this year and just hit its lowest level since May of 25. a contrarian extreme that has often preceded further upside.

Of course, this comes out today.

I mean, today's one day, but up one and a half.

And we're, what are we, 0.8% away from the all-time high, something like that.

While markets have largely muddled along in recent weeks despite rising yields and geopolitical tensions, investors are becoming increasingly pessimistic.

This week's American Association of Individual Investors, or AAII, sentiment survey showed 53.3% of investors have a bearish outlook for markets over the next six months.

That was up from 39.3% a week ago and well above the 31.5% historical average.

Investor sentiment remains a story of what's being said is not what's being done, said Saunders, noting that despite investors' bearish outlook, equity inflows remain strong.

I'm sure the guests have pointed this out, but we've seen a huge spike in bears.

That AAII sentiment poll, the most bears since Liberation Day, the least bulls this year.

You've got put-to-call ratios spiking a little bit.

They're not over the top.

And that is, again, to me, a symptom of a market that is very, very crowded in one direction.

If you look at, for example, the AAII survey, so the American Association of Individual Investors.

So they basically survey a lot of their markets.

very active retail investors and they are incredibly bearish um you know a rate hike suddenly in the mix a war that you know never ends uh basically a re-acceleration of the conflict between ukraine and russia in many ways at least if you look at the damage done on infrastructure and all of that you have so many things to worry about and yet um you know the market hasn't really sold off despite so many people being bearish i think it is a pretty good sign that we're about to see better times and i saw someone label it the september phobia we almost always have september phobia because it's you know if you look at the past 10 15 years september has a bad seasonality track record um it was kind of the same last year everyone was so bearish into september and we got a massive rally especially in some of the momentum names.

And I do enjoy the social aspects of investing.

I speak to the AAII groups, the Money Show, the New Orleans Conference.

I go to the Barron Investment Conference every year in New York City.

I do my own Freedom Fest conference in Las Vegas every July if people are interested.

I think maybe where I'm going to disagree is I think sentiment is still quite bearish.

You know, last week, AAII had a plurality of bears, you know, majority, which is basically rock bottom sentiment.

And I know our clients were de-risking.

There's been a lot of de-risking because they don't want to be buying stocks into a rising Fed.

Sentiment, Kip covered this last week as well.

AAII, the Investor Sentence Survey, bears at 53%.

Wow.

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