You now need a telescope to find a Bear/Commodity prices getting jumpy/Company comments/JGB yields

When highlighting stock market sentiment data strictly to take the temperature of the room and watching out for extremes, both bullish and bearish, from a contrarian standpoint, I've mentioned that a 40 point spread between the Bulls and Bears in the Investors Intelligence survey should be considered extreme. Well, yesterday's survey revealed an uber extreme read as Bulls got above 60 at 60.9 while Bears fell to just 14.5 from 16 last week where you now need a telescope to find a Bear. The Bear read is a 6 yr low and now we have a 46.4 Bull/Bear spread which is a flashing red light in the short term. This by the way incorporates trade thru last Friday which was a reversal day so surprising that the mood after that wasn't tempered at all. Today's retail focused AAII did see Bulls fall by 5.8 pts to 45.9 after a like rise last week to the highest since December. Bears though were little changed, up .1 pts to 21.9 as those Bulls went to the Neutral side.

Bottom line, in the short term this is very much worth taking note where a market rest/consolidation/digestion/correction/pullback, etc... are now more possible. I emphasize 'short term' as sentiment indicators should only be taken as such.

While it seems that the Fed so badly wants to start cutting rates, albeit gingerly, because they are afraid of over doing their stay, commodity prices are getting more volatile again and won't make their job easy at all. Especially since it threatens the disinflation we've seen in goods prices. Copper prices jumped almost 13 cents a pound yesterday, up 3.3% to a one year high as China will be cutting back smelter production. It's pulling back a touch today. We have oil prices back to $80 and gasoline prices at a 4 month high. The CRB raw industrials index touched the highest since October last week. The CRB food stuff index closed Tuesday at the highest since early December before pulling back yesterday. 

We remain bullish and long energy, copper, uranium and fertilizer stocks, along with precious metals. Inflation breakevens are hovering around one yr highs.