Bullish Sentiment Extends 3-Week Run For First Time In 2025 Even As Bearish Views Climb
After being bearish for most of the year and making an 11-week-long record bearish streak, the bullish sentiment, measured by the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) Sentiment Survey, made its first three-week-long streak for the week ended July 16 in 2025.
What Happened: Despite the new bullish streak, pessimism among individual investors about the short-term outlook increased this week.
This comes as the bearish sentiment rose from 35.6% last week to 39% this week. The AAII Sentiment Survey is conducted weekly from Thursday to Wednesday.
Regardless of the uptick in the bearish sentiment this week, the bullish sentiment has triumphed over the bearish sentiment for three weeks in a row, as pointed out by AAII VP Charles Rotblut in an X post.
The optimism first surpassed pessimism during the week ended July 2 and continued to be higher till the most recent week.
However, MTS Insights pointed out in an X post that this close push and pull between the optimistic and pessimistic sentiments rendered the market sentiment largely “neutral” for the year.
“The AAII Survey’s net bullishness level is basically zero, indicating neutral market sentiment,” the post said.
This week, the neutral sentiment, expectations that stock prices will stay essentially unchanged over the next six months, decreased 1.2 percentage points to 21.8%. Neutral sentiment was below its historical average of 31.5% for the 52nd time in 54 weeks.
The bull-bear spread (bullish minus bearish sentiment) decreased 5.5 percentage points to 0.3%. The bull-bear spread is below its historical average of 6.5% for the 23rd time in 24 weeks.
Why It Matters: AAII’s special question to its respondents this week was “How, if at all, have you changed your approach to investing recently?”
The mixed bad of responses included about 19.1% investors saying that they have become much more conservative/cautious, 19.8% said that they have become slightly more conservative.
Whereas, 26.2% said that they have switched around some investments, but only made modest changes overall. Whereas, 9.9% respondents said that they had become more aggressive. Only 25.1% oh investors made no change to their investing approach.
Price Action: The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY) and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (NASDAQ:QQQ), which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, were slightly higher in premarket on Friday. The SPY was up 0.14% at $628.95, while the QQQ advanced 0.13% to $562.55, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Read Next:
Photo courtesy: khunkornStudio via Shutterstock
© 2025 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Posted-In: Equities
