To paraphrase a knock upon economists, the FF board Poll has predicted 10 of the last 2 tops. the FF's were good at recognizing the Feb bottom, but they lost faith within two weeks and were consistently bearish on the March/ april advance. Similar results in the May- July advance. in the runup from the election, counting one point for actual partial positions and 2 points for full, there have been three days where the ff bull points exceeded the ff bear points, one tie, and 15 days, five times more, where the bear points exceeded the bull points. the raw totals of these points in this time period: bulls: 93, bears: 163, so bulls (93) divided by bulls + bears (256) = 36%. And all this in one of the strongest advances during the last few years. Using this methodology, the FF's did not have a single bulls greater than bears day in the post-brexit runup and were less bearish at the peak of that advance, around 9/2, than during the meat of the powerful post-brexit runup. The respondents in the weekly AAII poll seem much better at recognizing turns and staying with them. The AAII's might overstay their market, but at least they stay with it for longer than a week or two.
when I see people getting congratulated for, or reveling in, catching a 10-20 point move in a trade, I can only scratch my head.
The weekly ff numbers provide a similar result.
But, that's what makes markets, i.e. differences of interpretation.
I have kept it that way for 20 years. They don't know who each other are and nobody knows who they are. The group is as static as I can make it, so if someone dies or moves on to other things, I try to replace them with someone with a similar trading style. It's not a great fade most of the time, but I'm able to get a lot of information out of this survey, some of it very predictive.
