Recently I saw a headline on twitter saying that newsletter writers bullish sentiment was at a high and that was supposed to be a reason to sell stocks. In other times, people will bring up other types of sentiment/contrarian indicators. But if you wrote the same article saying 'stockchastics readings are at a multi-year high, sell stocks' people would jump all over it and call you an astrologist. Thing is, its probably not too difficult to find an stochastics setting that will match a particular sentiment reading (whether its newsletter writers or something else). It might not be a perfect fit but it should match pretty well over time
So that tells me that 'contrarianism' and sentiment indicators are just a glofiried version of overbought and oversold indicators. They do well in certain range markets but give back a lot in trending markets (and we are seeing this now as the market stayed overbought and yet, kept marching higher). Those indicators provide an illusion of control to the people using them but its only because they are not accounting for all the losses/missed gains they will have in trending markets
I'm not saying they have no value, they might in certain conditions but that they are quite close to stochastics/RSI type indicators, which those same people will say are worthless
So that tells me that 'contrarianism' and sentiment indicators are just a glofiried version of overbought and oversold indicators. They do well in certain range markets but give back a lot in trending markets (and we are seeing this now as the market stayed overbought and yet, kept marching higher). Those indicators provide an illusion of control to the people using them but its only because they are not accounting for all the losses/missed gains they will have in trending markets
I'm not saying they have no value, they might in certain conditions but that they are quite close to stochastics/RSI type indicators, which those same people will say are worthless
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