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Mix-Ansicht- Marc Hulbert: Zuviele Bullen - kingsolomon, 26.04.2003, 21:34
Marc Hulbert: Zuviele Bullen
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zur Info: Hulbert analysiert seit über 20 Jahren die Performance von Börsenbriefen.
This Can't Be a Bull Market. There Are Too Many Bulls.
By MARK HULBERT
INVESTORS who expect stocks to surge after the war in Iraq, as they did after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, may be overlooking an important difference. In the weeks before the 1991 conflict, the bears outnumbered the bulls, at least among investment newsletter editors. This time, the reverse has been true — and bull markets rarely begin when bulls outnumber bears.
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Consider the sentiment measure kept by Investors Intelligence, an advisory newsletter edited by Michael Burke. Each week, Mr. Burke's staff divides more than 100 newsletters into three categories: the bullish, the bearish and what might be called the correction camp — meaning those that are bullish over the long haul but expect a short-term decline. Mr. Burke found that in January 1991, just before the gulf war, 54.3 percent of investment newsletter editors were bearish, 33.6 percent bullish and the remainder in the correction camp.
And the bears' dominance was not fleeting. The average of Mr. Burke's weekly readings over the previous three months showed that 48.8 percent of advisers were bearish and 39.2 percent bullish.
The situation was nearly reversed on March 21 this year, as the war in Iraq was beginning: the bulls outnumbered the bears, 47.8 percent to 33.3 percent. The three-month averages were similar: 45.8 percent were bulls and 31.1 percent were bears.
According to Mr. Burke, bull markets typically begin only after several months of significantly bearish sentiment among advisers. At the bottom of the 1973-74 bear market, the three-month averages showed the bears outnumbering the bulls by 9.3 percentage points. Similarly, over the three months before the bottom of the 1981-82 bear market, the bears had a 15-point lead.
By contrast, in the current bear market, a slump more severe than either of the others, there have been only a handful of weeks when bears have outnumbered bulls. And at no point has the three-month average of bearish advisers exceeded that of the bulls.
From all that data, Mr. Burke concludes that investors are continuing"to work off the excesses that we saw during the huge secular bull market from 1982 to 2000, and we are not finished with that process."
The power of his analysis is demonstrated by the performance of his market-timing model, which varies its recommended exposure to stocks according to changes in the bullishness of the newsletters his staff monitors. An investor who followed that allocation by putting the stock portion in the Wilshire 5000 stock index and the rest in 90-day Treasury bills would have made 10.9 percent, annualized, from the beginning of 1987 through March this year. That is better than the 10.1 percent the investor would have made by buying and holding just the index fund. Better yet, the portfolio would have been 41 percent less volatile.
Currently, because of all the bullish sentiment, Mr. Burke's model advocates the inverse approach — that his subscribers' portfolios be entirely in cash.
A DIFFERENT gauge of sentiment — based on advisers' recommended exposure to stocks — also concludes that there are too many bulls for this to be the start of a new bull market. According to research conducted by the Hulbert Financial Digest, sentiment measured this way also correlates with market turning points.
The digest's data shows that the average market exposure among newsletters' equity portfolios dropped to as low as negative 19.2 percent in the days before the current war. (The negative number reflects recommended short positions.) But the recommended stock exposure has since surged to 61.6 percent, a climb of nearly 81 percentage points, one of the largest six-week increases since 1997, when the digest began compiling the data.
Such a rush back to stocks is more akin to the irrational exuberance of the later stages of a maturing bull market than the sentiment seen early in a new one.
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