actual exuberance like we had during the dot-com bubble when we were all going to the moon and we were all going to the stars with this wonderful new thing called the Intertubes.
And the housing bubble where, we were assured, housing prices would never drop on a nation-wide basis because it never has (as opposed to occasionally some localities), so that these wonderful ingenious financial-engineered geographically diversified CMOs were perfectly safe. And we could just go on using our houses as ATMs forever.
The hype and the irrational exuberance and ecstatic bubbly boo was actual. The results not so good.
Same way of course with excess pessimism, e.g. Business Week's "The Death of Equities" 1979 cover story. Or perhaps the 3.5% drop in the S&P 500 between Nov 24 close and Dec 3 close.
AAII Journal and others have found that market sentiment (bull, bear) is a contrarian indicator (the AAII Journal one looks at bull - bear sentiment on where survey-respondents think the market will be 6 months from now (up or down) -- and compares to the stock market 6 months later). (AAII = American Association of Individual Investors).
So, no I wouldn't use stock market moves as a predictor of what is going to occur. As a reflector of sentiment, it is excellent, but sentiment changes from day-to-day, week-to-week, and so on.
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increases 