It would be a better sign if bulls were nervous and stocks were making record highs.
A bull market is young when everyone is skeptical, it's mature when everyone is excited and it's overdone when the market is making all-time highs and strategists are more bullish than ever.
Enter Adam Parker, chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley. He writes today about how bullish he is on stocks and then takes a swipe at bond traders.
"Ten times this year we have thought to ourselves, 'how could anyone buy a French government bond and hold it to duration when they can buy the S&P500?'" Parker writes.
"After all, the S&P500 total yield (dividend plus repurchase) is well over 4%, and you only get 41 basis points per year from France! The only logical pushback we see would be that we are on the precipice of sustained deflation, or that we are close enough to a recession that we will get a materially better entry point on US stocks. We find bond guys to be statistically significantly more negative human beings than average."
He sees the same thing as every other stock market bull. A pickup in Q2 and Q3 and says stocks are in the middle of "the longest expansion ever."
