Mood Rings And Markets

The Leuthold Major Trend Index tracks eight sentiment surveys; four from the Conference Board covering consumer confidence and four industry measures of investor convictions. Each of these are contrarian signals, meaning that negative sentiment often relates to stronger equity markets while positive sentiment leads to weaker markets. We periodically review the effectiveness of each signal in the MTI, and this study takes a fresh look at a group of indicators related to consumer confidence and investor expectations.