Monday, March 25, 2013

"Too Bullish? Actually, Maybe People Are Too Bearish"

From ScienceDaily:
Confirmation bias
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias (or confirmatory bias) is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions, leading to statistical errors.
Confirmation bias is a type of cognitive bias and represents an error of inductive inference toward confirmation of the hypothesis under study....
In other words you have the sell-side, the buy-side and the my-side.

In this case the my-side is yesterday's "BBC: Cyprus says 'significant progress' in debt crisis talks":
...The major U.S. indices are looking for an excuse to go higher. This thinking isn't coming from some mystical Fibonacci extrapolation or data mining a sip from the firehose of news, short interest numbers or even quantified sentiment indicators.
Rather it is based on not much more than too many decades watching/working various markets around the world. The U.S. markets still exhibit too much wariness and too little hubris, there's no George Gilder making up words like "telecosm"....
From MarketBeat:

Too bullish, or too bearish? That is the question.

Shortly after we pointed to yet another Wall Streeter getting even more bullish on stocks, a research report from Bank of America  Merrill Lynch hit our inboxes saying investor sentiment is still too pessimistic to expect a correction.

It may seem odd to say so at this particular moment. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was recently down more than 100 points as the market ponders the wider ramifications of the Cyprus bailout. But in a way, that amplifies the point....MORE