AAII Sentiment Survey: Optimism Plunges To A 2-Year Low
http://www.barchart.com/headlines/story/8683351/aaii-sentiment-survey-optimism-plunges-to-a-2-year-low
My sense is that an upleg is going to start around the end of the month, either after the Greece problem is fixed, or after it unravels and triggers a larger correction.
I'll also make another point. There was a thread about a week ago from a guy who was looking for help buying stocks. He had been burned in the technology top in 2000 because he sold some tech stock and lost some money and was gun-shy, but apparently wasn't doing very well in mutual funds (big surprise there). So I looked up some numbers.
Following Peter Lynch methods (own what you know), I bought MSFT and INTC on the first trading day of 1991. Two years later, they were both up ~2.5 times, so I sold half and bought CSCO and ORCL. I mostly rode those 4 stocks to afford to retire in my 40's with a portfolio over $1 million back in 2000 (I went into coaching to have something to do). I started to phase out in fall of 1998 after Buffett wrote in his message to investors that he had stopped buying stocks in 1998 because he couldn't find anything worth buying (overvalued by his methods). I closed out of my last holdings in April 2000 and didn't own anything other than Pimco Total Return until the end of 2002.
So the question is, what if I didn't sell in 2000, didn't retire, and just held those stocks for about 25 years? These are the percentage returns from 1/1/1991 until now:
MSFT: 4,270%
INTC: 2,938%
ORCL: 25,405%
CSCO: 10.161%
I started in 1991 with $6600 left after I got rid of mutual funds that I had since before the 1987 crash, and $30000 from a commodity trade (long the Deutchmark for 18 months when the elder Bush was President).
If I had NOT sold in 2000 and rode it all the way down and all the way back up again, I would still have a few millions in my account, so I would say to think twice before selling because the market is "overvalued". The list of stocks I have that can be found many pages above in this thread I actually bought on June 22, 2009 (there are actually two more stocks that I bought in early 2012 when EMAs reversed---NVR and RYL, and you can look them up as well). I have held them for ~6 years and have no plans to sell. Yahoo Finance says they are presently up 519% since I bought them. I am actually hoping for some blood on the street due to the EU situation and am looking to buy.