On several previous occasions, we have discussed how the monthly Fund Manager Survey, in which Bank of America's Michael Hartnett polls several hundred institutional investors, while entertaining noise, is at best an exercise in analyzing prevailing schizophrenic mood swings and/or the pathological lying exhibited by professional investors. In other words, there is zero signal in the monthly survey with lots of pretty charts. It does, however, provide a glimpse into how the collapse of the "fourth wall" takes place on Wall Street, when prevailing popular narrative suddenly engulfs markets and is used as justification to explain market moves. In this case, the narrative is that not only is "orange man bad" for stocks, but his politics will spark inflation, stagflation, a flight of investors from the US into such havens for economic stability and growth as Europe and China, and generally the type of old testament apocalyptic mass hysteria best described by this scene in Ghostbusters.
With that preamble, and considering it was just one month ago when we mocked the very same survey, when we highlighted that while investors polled by the WSJ said they were the most pessimistic about stocks in years...
