Inliers: Not Every Swan Is Black

I listened to really smart bond guys that love stocks in here. I heard from some of the sharpest stock guys that love cash in here. I was told anecdotally about some of the most conservative investors who are all of the sudden looking to get into anything at all in here. And that was just yesterday.

Bears have pressed short interest higher right in the middle of a 12-week (and counting) streak of net fund inflows from the Bulls. The battle lines are drawn. Yet the most anxious of all appear to be the record crowds in cash, worried that’s being turned into trash. So where do we go from here? Even bloggers, a group not short of opinions, have suddenly lost their keyboards with that answer.

Birinyi & Associates keeps track of the top investment blogs’ sentiment. The “neutral” among them have hovered around 20% for most of the 12 months. In the last 2 months, confusion rallied “neutral” all the way up to 55%.

Perhaps the most fascinating to me, of all the different opinions and datapoints recently, is the one I found where many bulls and bears are correlated for the first time that I've ever seen. More on that in just a moment.

But first, I think most investors are looking for something, anything that is consistent in a world without solid 5-year growth like that pictured in the chart below.