ISE sentiment data continues to make contrarians feel more uneasy about equities markets' path

The sentiment data provided by ISE (see the ISE website in "other sites of interest" listed at the right side of the page here) continues to show bullish sentiment. You can see in their table (image below) that their All Equities ratio closed the day above 160 (middle column of the table - I use All Equities to factor out options on bonds). I've been curious about their "All Indices and ETFs Only" ratio, although I haven't yet been successful in finding explanations about it on their website. Anyone with information on it is welcome to comment about it. What I decided to do this afternoon, is to display that ratio in the ISE's interactive chart that sits atop their table (i.e., in the upper part of the image below). I selected a time frame going back to November 5, 2008, to take a look at how this ratio played out in the time frame just before and since the drops into the November 2008 and early March 2009 lows. So, even though I don't have explanations about what the ratio is supposed to represent, it's plain that it has a very distinct inverse correlation to the equity market's movements during this time frame. Given that this ratio is relatively low once again, I have to interpret it as one of the bearish signs for equity markets currently.

By the way, I also included (upper right image) today's "top bullish" and "top bearish" at ISE. I don't want to comment too much on this, because the several times I did comment, I later found that sometimes it was a better contrarian signal than at other times. For example, it helped paint a bearish picture of GM (and if memory serves, Delta) that, along with a rising wedge chart structure, helped us be in advance of the weakness that occurred. But when it related to ETF's, I think it didn't always work as well, perhaps because market participants may be using ETF's as a hedge against other positions they're taking on specific stocks. Today, FAZ is included as "Top Bullish" - so a contrarian would say, FAZ may go down and the financial sector may move up. Since I don't really know if this could be a way of hedging short positions in individual financial sector company stocks, all I will do in this post is point it out. Later we can look back and see which way this hot sentiment in FAZ might point for subsequent sector action.