Individual investor sentiment took a major hit this week as Washington headlines give investors another excuse to not like equities.  According to the weekly AAII survey, bullish sentiment dropped from 32.73% down to 23.85%.  That drop is the largest one-week decline since July 2015 and takes bullish sentiment down to its lowest level since last November’s election.  Also, in case you are still keeping score, bullish sentiment has now been below 50% for a record 124 straight weeks.

While bullish sentiment tanked, they didn’t all move into the bearish camp.  As shown in the chart below, bearish sentiment increased by less than half as much as bullish sentiment declined.  However, at a level of 34.25%, more than a third of individual investors consider themselves bearish.

Neutral sentiment surged back above 40% this week, rising from 37.05% up to 41.9% to its highest weekly reading since the election.  While investors were more than happy to sit on their hands in the weeks and months leading up the election, now it seems as though they are stepping to the sidelines to wait out what becomes of the Russia investigations.

It happened again this week.  We know we say it a lot, but it seems that when all else fails, jobless claims provide a port in the storm.  This week, first-time claims dropped to 232K from 236K last week and below consensus estimates of 240K.  This was the second lowest weekly print of the economic expansion and the 115th straight week where claims were below 300K.

With this week’s decline in weekly claims, the four-week moving average dropped to 240.75K from 243.5K.  That’s just 1K above the multi-decade low of 239.75K from early March, and barring a major spike higher (above 250K), next week’s level will be a new low.

On a non-seasonally adjusted basis, jobless claims dropped down to 206.5K from 215.2K last week.  For the current week of the year, this is the lowest print since 1973, and it is more than 100K below the average for the current week of the year dating back to 2000 (318.5K).