Bespoke co-founder Paul Hickey appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Thursday morning to discuss the markets and their reaction to Wednesday’s FOMC meeting.  To view the segment, click on the image below.

The S&P 500 may not have reached bear market territory as an index yet, but of the 500 individual stocks in the index, more than 60% are down at least 20% from their 52-week highs.  Overall, the average decline from a 52-week high is a staggering 25.7%!  The chart below shows the distance each of the individual components is trading from their 52-week highs grouped by 10 percentage point ranges.  As of Thursday afternoon, just 72 stocks in the S&P 500 are even trading within 10% of their 52-week highs.  Meanwhile, 82 stocks in the index are down 40% or more with 24 of those 82 stocks down by more than half!  Have their been uglier periods for the stock market?  You bet.  But not in a long time.

So which stocks are down the most?  There are actually a number of well-known names with stocks like General Electric (GE), Western Digital (WDC), Nvidia (NVDA), Halliburton (HAL), Wynn Resorts (WYNN), Micron (MU), and Applied Materials (AMAT) all having been more than cut in half.

The survey of individual investor sentiment from AAII showed slightly more optimism this week with bullish sentiment coming in at just under 25%.  That is a 4% jump from last week’s plunge to 20.9% taking equally from the bearish and neutral camp.  Even with this increase, the results are not overly optimistic as bullish sentiment is still the minority opinion and at much lower than average levels.  Last week’s reading was historically low, so it isn’t surprising that there was a small bounce.  This week’s reading is also a divergence from price action in that time.  On top of yesterday’s steep declines, markets have been broadly down since the last report alongside it being one of the worst Decembers to date, so an uptick—even a small one—is a bit of a surprise.  If the current pace of market weakness continues, don’t expect the sentiment boost to last very long.

Additionally, yesterday’s declines in the wake of the FOMC meeting are also likely to drain optimism. A near majority of investors are still pessimistic on the market as bearish sentiment remains at extremely elevated levels.  Ignoring the prior week, this week’s reading of 47.3% bearish sentiment is still right at multi-year highs.  In addition, and we have been seeing this a lot of late, since the AAII survey closes on Wednesday nights, the full impact of Wednesday’s declines—especially late in the day like yesterday—can be reasoned to not fully come into play for the sample of surveyed investors.  In other words, the damage done from Fed Chair Powell’s words likely weighed very lightly on this survey.  Moving to next week, as scary of a thought as it may be, we could see yet another large rise in bearish sentiment to even more elevated levels if price action is similar to how it has been.

Meanwhile, neutral sentiment came in a few points lower at 27.8% from last week’s 30.23%.  Neutral sentiment still outweighs bullish sentiment which expresses a decent degree of uncertainty among individual investors.

Following last week’s significant downtick to 206K for initial jobless claims, this week’s reading rose to 214K.  This is slightly below the 215K rise that was expected, and while this week’s release is about 12K higher than last week, it is still at the lower end of the range we have seen in the past year.  It is also well below the surprisingly elevated levels that we saw only a few weeks ago in late November.

As we have been highlighting, despite short-term upticks in claims, the indicator remains at very strong levels and has maintained some impressive streaks.  This week marks the 63rd straight week with claims coming in at or below 250K.  That’s the longest streak since the 89-week streak that ended in January 1970.  Claims have also remained below 300K for a record 198 weeks.

The 4-week moving average saw a slight decline to 222K.  This is only a little over 2K lower than last week’s 224.75K but well off of the short-term high of 228K from two weeks ago.

As we mentioned last week, the drop in claims was in line with seasonal patterns and likely bottomed out for the holiday season as this week’s uptick was to be expected.  Claims still had their strongest week in the time since 2000 on a non-seasonally adjusted basis.  It is also over 140K below the average for the current week since 2000.