Institutional brokers are becoming more bearish on equities over the last five trading days according to the Trade Ideas Monitor (TIM, see Hedge Funds Review article). The TIM is an application for measuring "ideas from authors (mainly brokers) to recipients (mainly buy-side clients)." (see youDevise website). Short ideas as a percentage of all new ideas sent to investment managers through TIM increased from 28.55 percent to 35.88 percent over the last five days. During the same five day period, the TIM Long-Short Index decreased 28.6% from 2.50 to 1.79, signaling more negativity on the market as a lower index reading implies that brokers are more bearish. The TIM Long-Short index measures the total number of long ideas sent to clients, compared to the total number of short ideas, with the ideas focused on market moves covering on average the next 1-3 weeks. This seems to correlate with some of the recent sentiment from technical analysts who predict that the markets may experience a short-term sell-off as they consolidate around key technical levels, even though the upward trend still appears to be in place.

The Alternative Investment Management Association (AIMA), an international trade body for the hedge fund industry, is reporting that an absolute majority of all assets under management by hedge funds and funds-of-funds are held by institutional investors. In addition, a third of those assets from institutional investors now come from pension funds. While the AIMA has some interest in promoting hedge funds and other alternative investments, the breakdown does highlight how a growing number of institutional investors, including pension funds, university endowments, and foundations that are invested in alternative investments, with the numbers growing each year. While there is certainly reason for individual investors and those on "main street" to be upset with some of what has been happening on Wall Street, using a blanket approach of penalizing all of Wall Street could have unintended consequences for individual pensions and those charitable and cultural activities often sponsored by endowments. Saying that "what is good for wall street is no longer good for main street," to paraphrase some in Washington, could be bad for the average citizen if actions begin to match the rhetoric.