Stats › Options, shorts and positioning › Investor sentiment
AAII investor sentiment
Sentiment data is just asking people how they feel and writing the answers down. The AAII survey asks its members one question every week: over the next six months, do you think the market goes up, sideways or down. The three answers become the bullish, neutral and bearish percentages, and it has been running that way since 1987.
That consistency is why it's on this site. Almost no sentiment measure can claim the same question, asked the same way, for nearly four decades. This page has the long run averages, the latest weekly reading, the twelve month highs in each category, and a section on how to actually read the series, which mostly means using the spread and smoothing it. It also deals with the contrarian claim, the idea that lots of bears is a buy signal and lots of bulls is a warning, because that's the reason most people look this survey up in the first place.
Fair warning on what it is and isn't. It measures what people say, not what they own, and someone can tell you they're bearish while sitting fully invested. That happens a lot. There's one source here, AAII's own page, and the numbers update every week, so the reading quoted below has a date on it and will be stale soon enough. Click through for the current one rather than trusting the figure on this page.
The AAII Sentiment Survey has asked individual investors whether they are bullish, neutral or bearish on the next six months every week since 1987. Its long run averages are 37.5% bullish, 31.5% neutral and 31.0% bearish. The reading for the week ending 29 July 2026 was 31.0% bullish, 26.9% neutral and 42.1% bearish, meaning bearishness is running about eleven points above its historical norm. The survey is widely treated as a contrarian indicator, and that claim is weaker than its popularity suggests.
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Below this point there are 7 sections, 1 chart and 1 named source, roughly 1200 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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