Musings on whether too much bearish sentiment may be supporting stock prices

Is it possible that there's so much bearish sentiment that it's supporting stock market prices? From a technical perspective we can argue that the market is overbought. But I am wondering if bearish sentiment showing up in the amount of put option activity is having an effect in terms of supporting prices. I'll really be more convinced either way by looking at actual cash market activity in terms of buying and selling volumes and the effects those have on technical indicators as prices move around key Fibonacci levels and trendlines. But sentiment is something that I like to keep an eye on as well. This post displays put/call data that can be obtained at the OptionPain.com site, specifically at their standard Option Pain webpage. Now, to be fair, the folks at OptionPain.com are showing that their newer "Current Pain" metric is more accurate - it measures the amounts of options (calls and puts) entered into as an option position since the most recent option expiration. Therefore they seem certain it's better and they give examples. However, to get it, you need a subscription.

Here is the free Option Pain you can get there - I ran it for the QQQQ so it has info as of the close yesterday. It looks reasonable to me to see $48 but I'll agree that the target can change over the next several weeks!
Now here is the same option pain for the QQQQ but the range is enlarged to the maximum range they have for it: from $25 to $61. Notice now how there's a HUGE amount of bearish put interest in the QQQQ all the way down to $25! What are these people thinking?!

Really it's a very interesting picture of sentiment. While I tend to think that the $48.50 Fib level in the QQQQ can be very revealing as to which direction the entire market heads next, this view of option pain has me wondering if the most we'll see is a pullback, corrective move in a bull market rather than a bear market. I don't know how to reconcile such a huge wall of bearish-sentiment puts with the idea that the QQQQ price could really fall so far, so fast. And if the QQQQ price does move down, it really does look unlikely to fall much below $44 by October 15 (which is the next opex)!