Gearhead Jim
Full time employment: Posting here.
When everyone is this negative it almost for sure that a rally will ensue. I watched Larry Kudlow's show on CNBC I believe on last Tuesday. He said he was having trouble finding a bull to be on his show. That was the clue for me to pump in some more money into the market the next morning which I did. Market has been up from there. It was clear at that point that just about everyone who was planning to sell had already sold. I'm not predicting this rally will last but I am starting to be able to read these moves much better now based on the amount of negativity that exists.
Recently I've noticed some moderately optomistic economic news stories; not predictions of a big advance but simply "the world is not ending now" stuff.
Since there is lots of money sitting on the sidelines and the beginnings of optimism in the press (which does the public's thinking for them), I suspect that the S&P 500 will end this year above the lows we've seen. Not that we won't see further bumps during the year...