Mary's Penny Picks

[DewmBoom]

$ONCI Breakout is ready to launch from the shoulders of an exhausted bearish Market Sentiment going against improved earning and fundamentals. What is a Market Sentiment, anyway, as defined in Investopedia?

Market Sentiment

Market sentiment refers to the psychology of market participants, individually and collectively. This is perhaps the most vexing category. Market sentiment is often subjective, biased, and obstinate. For example, you can make a solid judgment about a stock's future growth prospects, and the future may even confirm your projections, but in the meantime, the market may myopically dwell on a single piece of news that keeps the stock artificially high or low. And you can sometimes wait a long time in the hope that other investors will notice the fundamentals.

Market sentiment is being explored by the relatively new field of behavioral finance. It starts with the assumption that markets are apparently not efficient much of the time, and this inefficiency can be explained by psychology and other social science disciplines. The idea of applying social science to finance was fully legitimized when Daniel Kahneman, PhD, a psychologist, won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (the first psychologist to do so). Many of the ideas in behavioral finance confirm observable suspicions: that investors tend to overemphasize data that come easily to mind; that many investors react with greater pain to losses than with pleasure to equivalent gains; and that investors tend to persist in a mistake.

Some investors claim to be able to capitalize on the theory of behavioral finance. For the majority, however, the field is new enough to serve as the "catch-all" category, where everything we cannot explain is deposited.

The Bottom Line

Different types of investors depend on different factors. Short-term investors and traders tend to incorporate and may even prioritize technical factors. Long-term investors prioritize fundamentals and recognize that technical factors play an important role. Investors who believe strongly in fundamentals can reconcile themselves to technical forces with the following popular argument: technical factors and market sentiment often overwhelm the short run, but fundamentals will set the stock price in the long-run. In the meantime, we can expect more exciting developments in the area of behavioral finance, especially since traditional financial theories cannot seem to explain everything that happens in the market.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/04/100804.asp