The stock market looks fairly nice for a net buyer like me, with pleasant opportunities to add to holdings. Today’s drop isn’t even anything special, as trading volume is ridiculously low. If we were to really start falling, the volume would be enormously higher.
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I don’t dare to say anything about the short term, but I’m slowly adding more. Maybe I’ll hit rock bottom someday?
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It makes me wonder how this “extreme bearishness” will develop if we really go down. It feels like people are having a harder time now than during the COVID dip, even though we are almost double those levels. There’s still a long way down if this trend really continues for, say, a year.
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Fun fact: OMXHPI 1y return +0.88%
This pretty much reflects the situation. On average, everyone who started investing in the last year (=many) is already at a loss.
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This atmosphere certainly can’t be described as extremely bearish. An extremely bearish market is when the media writes about the death of the stock market, etc. 
There is a pessimistic atmosphere, but it can certainly get much darker. @musa_2 probably agrees with this view? 
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Yes, the macroeconomy has faced quite a few challenges. I am not a geopolitics expert and cannot assess the probabilities of war breaking out, but this is not an ideal situation from an economic perspective. Inflation is rampant, and the economy shows strong signs of cooling down. At the same time, interest rate hikes are likely to come (which often precede a recession). On top of this, Russia’s actions, coupled with possible economic sanctions, could cause very strong inflationary pressures even on food production. Add to this an energy crisis (or at least problems), and recession/stagflation scenarios are certainly not ruled out.
Of course, in the same breath, I must say that positive scenarios are also possible 
No one should panic about this.
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I’m pretty much on the same page. I see a lot of views here and in other investor social media that there’s a lot of bearishness and immense pessimism in the markets. And of course, it’s true that prices have declined in many places, and many portfolios have taken a hit recently.
But in my opinion, the atmosphere is perhaps more one of anticipation. It feels like many characteristics of a bull market are still present: IPOs are coming out, small investors are active, tabloid newspapers cover investing, etc. There’s still a lot of hope for stock investing and its returns. Perhaps the mood is trending towards more pessimism, but “I lost everything in the stock market” stories are still few, as is the situation where taxi drivers wouldn’t be sharing investment tips at the stand. This is more like flirting with bearishness than real desperate and frightening “everything is gone now” bearishness.
And I am 100% in the market with my growth-oriented portfolio, so this is not wishing for doomsday.
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Alright, “extremely” was perhaps a poor choice of word, but it is very bearish. I guess it also says something that in that AAII sentiment survey, there were fewer bulls last time in 2016. (And that figure is still almost a week old, before the recent escalation between Ukraine and Russia and the drop in indices)
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How is this actually done? Who are the respondents? I wonder if there could be a situation where, during times like these, the respondent group is skewed relative to the respondent group during times when investing is less interesting? In other words, could there now be more enthusiastic beginners among the respondents compared to, say, 2016?
Such things have most likely been taken into account in sentiment surveys, and the respondents have somehow been standardized to be comparable, but let’s bring this up for consideration anyway. In addition, I wonder if the respondent in the survey is a prisoner of their time. Now that it has been super hot for a couple of years, is the reference point (=previous years) “too good” and the sentiment is “historically bad” only relatively, but not absolutely?
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Extreme corrections are usually associated with recession and economic crisis. Now the economy is still pulling hard. Compared to corporate results and the economic situation, I think the sentiment is bearish.
Compared to the COVID-19 crisis, when it was a really valid question whether economies and businesses would survive the crisis. At that time, extremely bearish sentiment was in a slightly different context than today.
Now, the only bearishness is about whether margins will drop a bit and whether interest rates will rise back from an extreme position towards normal.
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I don’t personally give much weight to these sentiment surveys when considering absolute sentiment. As @Mauri already quite rightly pondered, I think the biggest bias in these is cognitive; when people answer these surveys, they base their answers on their recent experiences. Compared to a year ago, the situation is really pessimistic, and that is reflected in these surveys.
However, many “silent signs” / “qualitative arguments” (which cannot really be measured) do not yet give much indication that sentiment is terribly bearish. The euphoria is gone, but that does not make the mood incredibly bearish, in my opinion. People are still buying quite a lot and consider this dip temporary.
It seems that many of the current generation of investors (myself included) have not truly experienced a dark sentiment.
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Faaak. 
I should’ve followed the model portfolio regarding Fortum sales. 
Damn Putin should put that vodka bottle away and stop messing around.
Interest rate hikes due to inflation and the resulting possible recession were already a big enough concern. 
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The sentiment is extremely complacent in the sense that the 2021 results of listed companies at the index level are a cemented, achieved advantage from which the direction is only upwards.
It’s hard to argue that the sentiment is particularly negative as long as this view is so widely held.
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Alright, fasten your seatbelts. The best buying opportunities are apparently coming:
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I’ll tip off this discussion to the coffee drinkers, as the discussion title may not be the most appealing.
What kind of processes do you have behind your analyses, monitoring, or other decision-making? Come and share your thoughts in that discussion. I even put a small poll there as an incentive. 
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I could have just cold-heartedly sold it and cut my losses. As things stand, I’m planning to ride this out, but my mind might change. Luckily, it’s a very small part of the overall portfolio.
And I really regret not having refined my investment process and thought about exit strategies. The Russia risk with Fortum has already become a reality.
For everyone’s comfort:
From 4:25-5:25
“You don’t need to worry about volatility (did I get that right? ) as long as you have a long investment horizon.”
“After a bear market, everything just goes up initially. There is no such thing as normal volatility or value fluctuations.”
“But in fact, the average annual correction in the S&P 500 is 14%, and despite that, 70% of the time the market ends the year higher than where it started.”
“This is normal value fluctuation, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.”
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I’ll put my message here so I don’t spam the buy thread. So, a tip: SSAB is a bad buy for an OST (Osakesäästötili - share savings account) because, like Telia, dividends come from Sweden, meaning these will incur withholding tax even on an OST.
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As I understand it, @SijoitusSeppo is a basic optimist who is almost always fully invested with sufficient diversification. This is a good strategy. After all, one of our idols, the eternal basic optimist Kim Lindström, has also been on the buying side, at least judging from the headlines in Kauppalehti.
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I haven’t been bothered at all by the collapses of Fortum and Neste, which are the largest holdings in my portfolio. With Neste, my confidence in the business is strong, and on the other hand, last year’s Neste-like bubble was noticeable. Both are still significantly in profit, and it’s certainly less stressful to play with house money. Even though enough paper wealth has been destroyed
With Fortum (read Russia), I myself have become more pessimistic, but on the other hand, my decision to hold the shares until at least the middle of the decade was justified, and it’s not necessarily worth changing the plan every time Putin blusters.
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