But some seasoned portfolio strategists on Wall Street are upbeat, and holding on to their bullish year-end targets.
Only 27% of participants are bullish, but these numbers can still get more extreme, as less than 21% were bullish just a year ago.
If this is the case, traders will have even more reason to be bullish in their year-end bets, and defensives could underperform again this year.
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In the case of the bullish two-year note, you get three times the market's return but only for the first 12% to 35% of the market's return.
Sugar, wheat, corn, you name it, and it has probably seen some very bullish trade this year, but every pundit and his sister is forecasting higher food prices in 2011.
Have a look at what has become my favorite chart for the new year of 2012, the reason I am very bullish on stocks for the coming year.
Lockheed gave a bullish outlook for the year despite heightened political uncertainty.
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Correlation, of course, does not equal causation - and, so far at least, there is no reason to suggest that American football causes investors to feel suddenly more bullish in a given year.
Others who are bullish said once the market gets past the year-end holidays, gold will return to trading on its underlying bullish fundamentals of central bank monetary stimulus and that will allow gold to rise.
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The good news: for the first five months of this year BMW shoppers are bullish about the economy (see chart).
Analysts are just too bullish at the start of the year, then revise their estimates downward as the year comes to a close.
The Markets might try to probe the 1248-1254 support area, but this area should hold to keep bullish composure intact into the New Year.
Based on MACD and the coming of the "best six months" period, the Almanac Investor went bullish on Oct. 2 this year, five trading days ahead of the Oct. 9 bottom.
Long-term bullish investors eyeing fresh multi-year highs by Jan. 2013 expiration appear to have sold put options on the stock in order to partially offset the cost of debit call spreads.
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Still, the yellow metal remains up about 20% this year and most analysts remain bullish.
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Bullish sentiment is near a two-year low in the latest AAII Sentiment Survey, while bearish sentiment has spiked by 17.5 percentage points over the past two weeks.
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These Dow stocks are part of a very select group to have gained this year, and all show bullish chart patterns and would be good buys on a further market correction.
Earlier this year Keiser put out a bullish report on location technologies: mapp Close ing database firms TeleAtlas and Navteq, dashboard navigation device makers such as TomTom and Garmin, and global positioning system chip firms like Sirf Technology Holdings.
Stock Trader's Almanac founder Yale Hirsch is credited with coming up with the "first five days" indicator, which essentially says that the direction of the first five days of January is predictive of January, which can have bullish implications for the rest of the year.
Earlier this year Keiser put out a bullish report on location technologies: mapp Close ing database firms TeleAtlas and Navteq (nyse: NVT - news - people ), dashboard navigation device makers such as TomTom and Garmin (nasdaq: GRMN - news - people ), and global positioning system chip firms like Sirf Technology Holdings.
The third year of a presidential term is bullish.
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Over the past few days, investors have been unwinding the bullish positions they had built up earlier this year, as fears over Iranian supply faded and more worrying signs emerged in the manufacturing sector, Mr. Allidina said.
The Indonesian market did very well early this year and global fund managers were very bullish -- until the July demonstrations.
Though individual investors are bullish about the six-month and full-year outlook for stocks, they did not increase their portfolio allocations to equities.
My theory is that the closes over a nine-year period are the summation of all bullish and bearish events for that market or specific stock.
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The short-term (1-3 year) outlook for agricultural commodities is bullish enough.
The 67-year-old business leader is more bullish than ever on China.
Scout Capital, which announced a 5% stake in Sensata Technology Holdings in May of this year, presented their reasons for being bullish on the company today at the Value Investing Congress in New York City.
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