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Complacency Defined

Helene Meisler

A while back, I showed a chart of the Investor's Intelligence readings and how the bears stayed at the 30% level throughout the spring of 2002 while the S&P 500 hovered at its highs at the time.

Then a few weeks after that, we started getting all this protectionist talk from Washington, something we hadn't seen since the steel tariffs of 2002.

Last week there was all this talk about how interest rates hadn't been this high since 2002.

And now I see some folks pointing out that the Dow Jones Industrial Average just had its best first quarter since 2002.

Folks, 2002 was not a good year!

All these comparisons to 2002 should not give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. Yet oddly enough, this is the year that keeps cropping up in comparisons, as in "we haven't seen this since 2002."

As for Monday's market, I don't know how you could have possibly thought it was a good rally at any point. Breadth lagged the entire day, volume wasn't great, and the commodity stocks might have been the rally leaders, but I had to search far and wide to find many of those names that were making higher highs than last Thursday's high.

In fact, I found myself wondering if the commodities -- and by extension, commodity stocks -- were now going into the alternate day style of trading. Hey, they were up Thursday, down Friday, then up yesterday. Maybe they will rally today?

Or what about General Motors(GM Quote - Cramer on GM - Stock Picks)? We have been waiting for this "good news" from GM about the selling of GMAC for what seems like an eternity. I would say folks bought the rumor and sold the news, but I'm not sure I even see the buying of the rumor on the chart. Oh wait, maybe it was because it really isn't selling any cars!

Of course if you look at the retailers' performance from Monday, maybe they aren't selling anything either!

All of this happens, and the put/call ratio falls to levels we haven't seen since early February, just as the market was getting ready for a fall.

So it seems that no one is concerned about the retailers, no one is concerned about the market giving up its gains from yesterday (or the lagging breadth while we were up), and surely no one is concerned with all these 2002 comparisons.

I think that's called complacency.

Overbought/Oversold Oscillators

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