History shows that as a group mutual fund managers act like a typical crowd … susceptible to herding and group thinking.

They are most heavily invested near important market tops. And at market bottoms most of them turn bearish. That will never change … it’s human nature.

Hence it makes a lot of sense to look at what fund managers are doing — and take the opposite position whenever they are all doing the same thing. That’s why one of my favorite cyclical sentiment indicators is the average cash level of mutual funds.

Just look at the following chart. It shows the NYSE Composite Index on a monthly basis and the mutual fund cash level since 2005.

From the opening paragraph, the bolded is not what the market wants to hear:

This is not what the market wanted to hear: "Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggested continued growth in national economic activity during the reporting period of mid-July through the end of August, but with widespread signs of a deceleration compared with preceding periods. Economic growth at a modest pace was the most common characterization of overall conditions, as provided by the five western Districts of  St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The reports from Boston and Cleveland also pointed to positive developments or net improvements compared with the previous reporting period. However, the remaining Districts of New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, and Chicago  all highlighted mixed conditions or deceleration in overall economic activity."

And the only way for prices is down... i.e. - deflation.

Upward price pressures remained quite limited for most categories of final goods and services, despite higher prices for selected commodities [ahem, bitchez] such as grains and some industrial materials. Wage pressures also were limited, although a few Districts noted increased upward pressures in a narrow set of sectors experiencing a mismatch between job requirements and applicant skills. READ MORE

We like Erin Burnett: after all she is ranked 33 on the Fortune 40 under 40. Who can not like someone who has managed to get that high in the rankings on pure talent, although some recent CNBC appearances did seem to indicate a slight, shall we say, bias, when her guests tend not to disagree with Ms. Burnett's misperception of the world. Indeed, in a recent appearance on Meet The Press, the youngish CNBC anchor made some statements that go straight to errorchecking and bias validation. At 47 minutes into the  interview (extracted) Ms. Burnett says: "I think the problem is you have the fastest job creation in this recovery than you have in any recession in 25 years... Technically speaking this recovery has not been tepid." Alas, we are not sure who fed the CNBC employee these "facts" and figures, but they are patently false.

On the first item, we present the quite famous chart comparing job recoveries across all historical recessions. Alas, this chart argues for precisely the opposite of what Ms. Burnett claims - we are currently experiencing the recession with the slowest job creation in history. And based on our prior estimates, the recession will last around 85 months before we regain the unemployment rate seen at the onset in December 2007. READ MORE