With the S&P 500 up around 4% since last Thursday’s close, bullish sentiment has unsurprisingly picked up with the percentage of investors reporting as bullish in AAII’s survey rising to 29% this week off of the recent low of 23.31% last week. At that level, bullish sentiment still remains low below levels seen as recently as the last week of April when it was at 30.6%.

The bulk of investors remain bearish. A little over 45% reported as such this week which was an improvement from readings of over 50% over the past two weeks. Similar to bullish sentiment, that leaves bearish sentiment at its lowest level since the last week of April.

While improved, bearish sentiment remains elevated relative to its historical readings as it has been for some time now. In fact, it has been above its historical average of 30.5% for 13 consecutive weeks now. That is tied with another 13-week long streak that lasted from the end of 2018 through the first weeks of 2019 for the longest stretch of above-average bearish readings since a 15-week long run that ended in August of 2012.  Granted, that is not nearly as long of a time of high bearish readings as was seen in the years of the Financial Crisis.  Back then bearish sentiment came in above average for 83 straight weeks.  But as shown in the second chart below, bearish sentiment has not only been just above average. It has been so by at least one standard deviation for 11 straight weeks.  That is now the fourth-longest steak on record and the longest since 2008’s 14-week run.

Neutral sentiment has been pretty stable with around a quarter of respondents reporting as such over the past several weeks.  After recovering from its multiyear low of 14.5% in March, neutral sentiment has remained within two percentage points of 25% for each of the past five weeks.  Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to access our interactive economic indicators monitor and much more.

For the seventh week in a row, jobless claims have been falling coming in at 2.438 million which was above forecasts of 2.4 million. This week’s 2.438 million number is the lowest claims data point since the first spike in March. That is certainly a positive as those declines are a sign of improvement, but claims also continue to print at much higher levels than anything observed prior to COVID-19 as the running total since the first print over one million in March now stands at 38.6 million. That is roughly 11.8% of the US population or 23.5% of the labor force.

As previously mentioned, this was the seventh consecutive week in which jobless claims declined week over week.  As shown in the chart below that is an unprecedented streak.  In the data going back to the late 1960s, there have only been two other stretches of seven weeks of declines: one ending in October of 1980 and another ending in November of 2013.  Given jobless claims are at such extremely high levels and have very far to fall until they return to normal, this streak certainly could keep growing.

As for the non-seasonally adjusted data, this was only the sixth consecutive week with a decline, but this week’s 2.174 million number, as with the seasonally adjusted number, is also the lowest print since the first of the extreme readings in March.

The four week moving average has also continued to decline consistently falling for a fourth straight week down to 3.042 million.  While an improvement, this week’s decline of 501K was the smallest week over week decline since the four week moving average began to turn around four weeks ago.

Again while initial jobless claims have been improving in recent weeks, a massive number of people in the US remain unemployed. Although lagged one week to initial jobless claims, continuing jobless claims came in at a record 25.073 million this week. Start a two-week free trial to Bespoke Institutional to access our interactive economic indicators monitor and much more.