Despondent

You can often sense the change in the traders' mood by watching CNBC.  In particular, CNBC Fast Money.  The whole crew, except for permabull Pete Najarian, were gloomy and bracing for further weakness.  Steve Grasso said he sold.  So did Tim Seymour.  Guy Adami was dour.  It is sad that I have watched the show so many times that I remember all their names and their tendencies.  But this small sample size is a good barometer of the mood of Wall Street.  The traders and investors are getting despondent.

I play a lone hand, but I do have a few contacts who are not hard core traders, but are part time traders.  They are usually willing to trade counter trend but when it gets extreme, they start getting fearful.  I talked to one of them yesterday, someone who invested in the BRICs in 2007, and only recently got back into the stock market last year, has been shaken up by the recent volatility, especially the tech swoon.  After contemplating investing in bitcoin for most of 2017, he finally invested in cryptocurrencies in December 2017, despite my advice to not do it.

Anyway, these are just anecdotal things I am observing these days.  It is not scientific or data driven, but it adds to the data picture that I see with the put/call ratios (high), investor fund flows (heavy outflows for last 2 weeks), and sector rotations from tech to defensive names.

By the way, how soon we forget about the bond market when it is rallying.  The 10 year has quietly settled under 2.80%, below the 2.80-2.95% range that it was trading since early February.  That should calm the fears of an interest rate spike that many investors had last month.  The main worries are just the price action and the weakness in the FANGs.  That is definitely a more benevolent investing environment than last month when both stocks and bonds were going down together.