Investors Not Feeling This Market

The stock market has been pretty strong over the past month. Since the election, the S&P 500 index is up 3.8 percent, while the Dow is up 5.5 percent and the Nasdaq up 3.2 percent. But individual investors don't seem to quite believe in it. 

While sentiment on the part of individual investors definitely has seen an uptick since the election, in the last two weeks, that positive momentum has stalled. In AAII's sentiment survey, optimism is  down over six percentage points from where it was two weeks ago even as equities have been rallying to record highs. In this week’s sentiment survey, individual investor bullish sentiment slipped to 43.1 percent. 

That means despite the strong showing, less than half of all investors feel optimistic about this market. In fact, the last time more than half of individual investors were bullish was 101 weeks ago at the start of 2015.