When a magazine puts the market on its cover, it's usually time to do the opposite. 63 magazine covers over 24 years is a thin sample, roughly two and a half a year, so I wouldn't lean too hard on this chart in isolation. That said, I've come across other studies with larger samples that land in a similar place: by the time a bearish cover hits the newsstand, much of the pain tends to be behind us, and bullish covers have a habit of showing up near the top. I think investors are best served by using the entire toolkit available to them. Fundamental analysis, technical analysis, sentiment and perception analysis, data-driven insights, boots-on-the-ground research and plain common sense each catch things the others miss. Being a contrarian works, as this chart illustrates, and the magazine cover indicator is one small piece of the sentiment puzzle we try to solve when looking for signs that a bottom is near, whether in an individual stock or a broad index. On individual stocks, @SixSigmaCapital recently wrote a great thread on how he times his entries, and social media sentiment plays a part in it. In many ways, the tone on X and SS is the modern proxy for the magazine cover. I'd add one caution. Fintwit is its own echo chamber, and the mood in our corner of the internet doesn't always reflect how the broader investing public feels.