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Marketplace

Friday, June 8, 2007

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Buzzword: Bull-bear ratio

The Wall Street bull

Need to know how your stocks are doing? There's no better way to describe a market than by using examples from the animal kingdom.

The Wall Street bull (Spencer Platt, Getty Images)

More on The Economy, Investing

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A financial zoo brings us this week's Marketplace Money buzzword: bull-bear ratio.

The bull-bear ratio is a weekly indicator that gets info from Wall Street insiders. Ratio analysts pull financial advisers to see what they're telling their clients. Bull if advisers think the market's on an upswing, bear if it's on a downturn.

This week, the bull-bear ratio fell for the third straight time. Some experts say the ratio is a good judge of what the average investor might do. More bad news leads to selling, and that means other investors might follow. Which means that there's another animal on the loose: baaaaaaaaaaa . . .

Music From This Show

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  • Just Checking Beautiful South Buy
  • Simple Things Dirty Vegas Buy
  • How Does Your Garden Grow? Dave Brubeck
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  • Wild World Shahin & Sepehr Buy
  • African Ivory The Samples Buy

Marketplace Confessional

"I disagree with Diana Nyad, who told Bob Moon today that Americans are not interested in Wimbledon because there are so few Americans playing. I love watching tennis, no matter who is playing. I have watched tennis for years, but the networks toy with us, creating drama rather than showing the match. Oftentimes, televised matches end precisely when the allotted time expires, even if they have to cut and splice. When they don't, as happened in a Nadal match last weekend, we were left hanging at the end of two sets, as NBC switched to women's golf. I don't have cable TV, so I couldn't switch to MSNBC as was suggested. It's enough to make me turn off the TV and read about the matches online."

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