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Stock Market Confidence Indices

The Investor Behavior Project at Yale University, under the direction of Professor Robert Shiller since its beginning and now under the auspices of the Yale International Center for Finance, has been collecting questionnaire survey data on the behavior of US investors since 1984.

Among the studies that this project has produced was a major study of investor thinking on the day of the stock market crash of 1987. As part of this project, regular questionnaire investor attitude surveys have been done continuously since 1989. The following reports on some stock market confidence indexes derived from this survey data. These indexes have a span of nearly thirty years, and thus are the longest-running effort to measure investor confidence and related investor attitudes. Similar surveys have been conducted in the Chinese and Japanese markets. 

Reports on some stock market confidence indexes derived from survey data on the behavior of U.S. investors.

A parallel effort to sample Japanese investor attitudes has been undertaken since 1989 by Professor Yoshiro Tsutsui of Osaka University, Fumiko Kon-Ya of the Japan Securities Research Institute, and Akiko Kamesaka of Aoyama Gakuin University.