This is the video recording of the August 2024 Mid-month Conference Call.

We use sentiment to help put the behavior of the stock market into context.

When looking at markets, it's easy to see what stocks are doing. All you have to do is look.

But what are people thinking? That's what we want to know.

When everyone is bullish, it's hard for stocks to go up in price at the same rate. When everyone turns bearish, that's historically a great time to be putting money to work.

Coming into August, sentiment was running hot. The VIX was at 10, the put/call ratio was muted, newsletter writers were giving us some of their most bullish readings of all-time, and our sentiment composite was as complacent as it's ever been.

Boy did that change quickly.

We just saw the largest week over week spike in bears among individual investors since 2022, just as this bull market was getting started.

Look at that spike this week:

BlackRock just filed for a "Nasdaq Top 30" Stocks" ETF.

That's the top

This is the company that runs the iShares ETFs.

NOW is when they want to launch a vehicle for investors to buy ONLY the top 30 Nasdaq stocks?

Now?

Where was this 10 years ago?

To me, this type of sentiment is just further evidence that Technology has peaked as a percentage of total market cap in the stock market.

This sort of top-heavy hype is confirming what price is already suggesting.

Look at Technology hitting new 10-month lows today relative to the S&P500:

What's driving stock prices?

Remember, over the short- to intermediate-term, stock prices don't move based on the fundamentals. They move up and down based on positioning, or in many cases, a lack of positioning.

When no one wanted Tech and mega-cap growth at the end of 2022, that was when Tech and mega-cap growth really got going.

Before that, when everyone wanted high growth Tech, Cathy Wood was the next Warren Buffett, and that's when Tech stopped working for a while - and is still not working in many of cases.

That's sentiment driving those things.

This is the video recording of our August 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session

This is the video recording of the June 2024 Mid-month Conference Call.

From the Desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

Last week, we held our April Monthly Conference Call, which Premium Members can access and rewatch here.

In this post, we’ll do our best to summarize it by highlighting five of the most important charts and/or themes we covered, along with commentary on each.

Let’s get right into it!

I just got back from a weekend in Nashville with my wife.

We had such a great time.

I had never been to Nashville before. It was just one of those places I hadn't gotten to yet.

But I picked up on the vibes right away, even at the airport before the flight and during the flight itself, which was Thursday night at 10PM.

Everyone was on the same page - "We're here to party and have a good time".

This is the video recording of the May 2024 Mid-month Conference Call.

I love a stock that people hate for reasons that have nothing to do with the stock.

We've seen it so many times before and I promise that we'll see it again.

These days the most amount of anger is being pointed towards Trump Media.

Dig this:

• People hate the company
• People hate the Trump
• People hate SPACs

This checks off all 3 boxes.

I love that!

It's amazing what price action can do to change sentiment.

We went from frothy optimism just a couple of months ago, to a much more pessimistic environment for investors.

This table below is a great summary of the different gauges we look at to measure sentiment and what they've done over the past month.

The blue diamonds are the current readings and the gray triangles represent where these were a month ago.

This is the video recording of our April 1st Monthly Charts Live Strategy Session