Sentiment Surveys: AAII, NAAIM, II, BofA Fund Manager

[lochvale]

Starting this thread to regularly track trader and fund manager sentiment
The major surveys (and who are surveyed):

• AAII: 2-300 individual investors (weekly)
• Investors Intelligence: About 100+ independent investment newsletters (weekly)
• NAAIM: Active investment managers (number is hard to discern, could be 30-150) (weekly)
• BofA fund manager: ~200 institutional fund managers overseeing $500B+ in AUM (monthly)

Basically you want to think about being contrarian when these surveys are at extremes

 

[lochvale]

This is the recent AAII reading
Individual Investors are very bearish

 

[lochvale]

Fund managers are also currently very bearish.

 

[lochvale]

The NAAIM survey of investment managers asks:

"What is your firm’s current overall equity exposure as a percentage of your portfolio?"
Respondents give a single number, from 200% leveraged long to 100% net short

For example:
+100% = fully long
+50% = half allocated to equities
0% = neutral / cash
–50% = net short
+200% = leveraged long

Current reading is 35.6% Exposure (they are bearish)

There's sometimes not a very big sample size with this survey
So you have to be careful reading too much into it

 

[lochvale]

With the Investors Intelligence survey of newsletter writers.

Each week, they classify each newsletter into one of three buckets:

Bullish – expecting higher stock prices
Bearish – expecting lower stock prices
Correction – neutral/sideways view (short-term pullback in uptrend)

The current reading is 23.6% Bullish


If you use sentiment in your process (or ignore it), I’d be curious how you treat it.
I’ll try and update this thread weekly.