Yale School of Management Stock Market Confidence Indexes™

Overview

The Investor Behavior Project at Yale University, under the direction of Dr. 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 twelve years, and thus are the longest-running effort to measure investor confidence and related investor attitudes.

Click on the images below to view more detailed charts and explanations. Please read terms of use before using this data.

Institutional Investors shown in blue, Individual Investors shown in red.

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