One index that hasn’t been participating in the market’s rally this year is the Bloomberg IPO Index, which is made up of companies that have IPOd within the past year.  We just wanted to show you a quick chart to highlight the weakness for IPO stock performance.

Below is a chart comparing the performance of the Bloomberg IPO Index to the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average since the bull market began back in March 2009.  As shown, the Tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 is up by far the most at +467%, which might make you assume that IPOs would also be doing pretty well.  But even the Dow 30 has outperformed the IPO Index and by quite a bit at that!  Since the bull market began, the Dow is up 236% on a simple price return basis, while the IPO index brings up the rear in this group with a gain of just 163%.  Over the past year, the IPO index has basically traded completely sideways.

The Dow just crossed another 1,000 point threshold, and most major US equity averages are at or near all-time highs.  So what do you think should happen to investor sentiment?  Well, these days investors would naturally get more bearish!  That’s the way things shook out in the numbers regarding AAII’s weekly sentiment survey.  In this week’s update, bearish sentiment spiked from 24.32% up to 32.1%.  That’s the highest weekly reading since mid-May and the largest weekly increase since March!  So much for animal spirits.

Even though bearish sentiment spiked this week, bullish sentiment also ticked higher, rising from 34.46% up to 36.11%.  Ironically, that was also the highest weekly reading for bullish sentiment since early May, but it still marks a record 135th straight week where bulls have not been in the majority.

All those new bears this week came from the neutral camp where sentiment dropped from 41.22% down to 31.79% in what was the largest one week decline for fence-sitters since the week after the election.  If there’s anything positive to be said about this week’s sentiment figures, you can say that at least individual investors are taking a stand.

Jobless claims came in slightly better than expected this week, falling from 245K down to 240K compared to expectations of 243K.  It has now been nine weeks that claims have been at or below 250K, but more importantly, it was the 126th straight week that claims were under 300K.  That hasn’t happened since 1970!

With this week’s decline, the four-week moving average dropped down to 241.75K, which is just over 6K more than the multi-decade low of 235.5K that was hit eleven weeks ago.  While claims are close to a new low, don’t expect that level from mid-May to go down anytime soon.

The real headline in this week’s report was in the non-seasonally adjusted reading, where claims dropped below 200K!  That’s a pretty amazing feat for any time of the year, but for the current week of the year, it’s more than 100K below the average of 302K going back to 2000.  And guess when the last time claims were this low for the current week of the year?  The answer to that question is NEVER!  Or at least not since they have been tracking jobless claims going all the way back to 1968!

Bespoke co-founder Paul Hickey appeared on CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett and CNBC’s Power Lunch on Thursday to discuss our market thoughts.  To view either of the segments, please click on the images below.

With the drop in the US dollar and the outperformance of international stocks, the US stock market is losing share versus the rest of the world even though it’s in rally mode.  While the S&P 500 is up 10% year-to-date, the United States’ stock market cap as a percentage of total world stock market cap has dropped from 37.70% all the way down to 35% so far this year.

Just after Trump’s victory last November, the US quickly gained a lot of market cap versus the rest of the world, but that gain has more than evaporated at this point.  Since the election, the US has now lost more than one and a half percentage points of world stock market cap share.  That’s the opposite of what Trump was hoping for.  So even though the President has been touting the stock market’s gain lately, when you look closely, it has actually lost share versus the rest of the world since his victory.