TIM Predicting Bearishness For Next 1-3 Weeks

Institutional brokers are becoming more bearish on equities over the last five trading days according to the Trade Ideas Monitor (TIM, see Hedge Funds Review article). The TIM is an application for measuring "ideas from authors (mainly brokers) to recipients (mainly buy-side clients)." (see youDevise website). Short ideas as a percentage of all new ideas sent to investment managers through TIM increased from 28.55 percent to 35.88 percent over the last five days. During the same five day period, the TIM Long-Short Index decreased 28.6% from 2.50 to 1.79, signaling more negativity on the market as a lower index reading implies that brokers are more bearish. The TIM Long-Short index measures the total number of long ideas sent to clients, compared to the total number of short ideas, with the ideas focused on market moves covering on average the next 1-3 weeks. This seems to correlate with some of the recent sentiment from technical analysts who predict that the markets may experience a short-term sell-off as they consolidate around key technical levels, even though the upward trend still appears to be in place.