GregT

Q3 Sentiment for Consumer Products: General Mills Leads, Coke Gains Ground

Without knowing much about "sentiment", I would have to say that I'm skeptical of using it. It seems like a way to invest "with the herd" and probably would encourage buying a stock too late and selling at the worst time.

The end of the article said: "Overall this group [consumer products] under performed for the quarter. Sentiment for the S&P 500 was up over 40%, while this group lost on average 4% in sentiment."

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that the S&P was lead by cyclical and financial shares - the same shares that had the biggest drops when things started to go south a year ago. Now that the cyclical/financial stocks have reached more typical valuations, it would not be surprising to see traditional "growth" stocks lead the market. In fact, that has been happening recently as companies like PEP and PG are gaining on analyst's comments that they are very inexpensive by a number of measures.