Concept
Sentiment Surveys
Sentiment Surveys, also known as AAII, Investors Intelligence, NAAIM, consensus polls, are Breadth, Sentiment & External Data concepts. A reference entry: the Library explains it rather than implements it.
What are sentiment surveys?
Sentiment surveys are recurring polls that ask a defined group of investors how they feel about the market, published as the share of respondents in each stance. The best known in US equities are the AAII Investor Sentiment Survey, polling individual-investor members weekly since 1987 on their six-month stock outlook, and Investors Intelligence's Advisors Sentiment, classifying independent investment newsletters as bullish, bearish, or expecting a correction since 1963.
The related NAAIM Exposure Index has active managers report their actual average equity exposure weekly, on a scale from leveraged short to leveraged long, closer to self-reported positioning than pure opinion. Institutional polls such as Bank of America's monthly Global Fund Manager Survey add allocation, cash-level, and crowded-trade readings from professionals.
The workhorse metric is the bull-bear spread read against its own history. Surveys serve mostly as contrarian inputs at extremes: lopsided pessimism has often appeared near durable lows, lopsided optimism near vulnerable stretches, though extremes can persist for weeks in strong trends.
Why there's no indicator for this
Survey results cannot be computed from a chart because they are not market data: they are answers to a questionnaire, collected and published by the sponsoring organizations. No transform of price or volume recovers what AAII members or newsletter writers said this week. The series exist as proprietary publications, some free in summary form and others, like Investors Intelligence, licensed commercially with redistribution restrictions.
Some platforms license these series and plot them as external data feeds; that is data licensing, not indicator computation. Price-derived stand-ins, from momentum to implied volatility, capture how the market is behaving, not what a defined population says it believes, and the gap between the two is what makes survey data informative.
How to read a sentiment survey
The value lies less in any single print than in where a reading sits against the survey's history.
- 1Know who is polled and what is asked; individual investors, newsletter writers, and active managers are different crowds with different biases.
- 2Read the bull-bear spread as a percentile or z-score against multi-year history rather than as an absolute number.
- 3Require persistence; a single extreme week is noise, while several consecutive extreme readings carry more weight.
- 4Cross-check stated opinion against revealed positioning like COT reports or crypto funding rates; investors do not always trade what they tell pollsters.
How traders use it
- Contrarian extremes: multi-year lows in bulls or a deeply negative bull-bear spread are treated as conditions favoring durable lows, usually as a filter over other setups rather than a standalone trigger.
- Regime context: moderate optimism alongside healthy breadth, such as strong net new highs, reads as a normal bull market, while euphoric surveys with narrowing breadth read as late-cycle.
- Composite inputs: survey readings feed some blended sentiment gauges alongside market-derived measures like the VIX; the best-known Fear & Greed Index blends purely market-based inputs in the same spirit.
- Say-versus-hold checks: desks line surveys up against NAAIM exposure and futures positioning to separate what investors claim from what they actually hold.
Related concepts · Surveys & composite sentiment
Concept family
Breadth, Sentiment & External Data
63 concepts mapped · 61 in the Library
Sentiment Surveys FAQ
What is the difference between AAII and Investors Intelligence?
AAII polls individual investors on their six-month outlook, so it swings quickly and noisily. Investors Intelligence classifies the published stance of investment newsletters, which moves more slowly and is often watched for extreme bull-bear ratios.
What counts as an extreme reading?
No fixed threshold holds across eras, so practitioners use percentiles of the bull-bear spread against long history. Readings rare within the survey's own record, sustained for multiple weeks, are what most treat as meaningful.
Are sentiment surveys reliable contrarian signals?
Imperfect ones. Extreme pessimism has generally been the more useful tell near major lows, while optimism can stay elevated through long stretches of healthy bull markets. Most desks use surveys as context beside positioning and breadth, not as triggers.
Is the NAAIM Exposure Index a survey or positioning data?
Both, in a sense: managers self-report actual average equity exposure, so it behaves like positioning gathered by poll, loosely comparable to what a long/short account ratio shows for crypto exchanges.
Where can I find the data?
AAII publishes weekly results on its site, NAAIM posts its index publicly, Investors Intelligence is subscription-based, and bank surveys circulate to clients, with headlines in the financial press.
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