The equities market is like Lake Woebegone, where everyone is above average. Every day brings the opportunity to find out what the other guy is doing, and if your opinion of him is low enough, to do the opposite. But that brings a new problem: How do you find out what the other guy is doing?
Recently there has a been a rash of articles on this perpetual problem. Ameritrade recently created an index of investor sentiment based on their own customers' equity positions, a kind of giant, anonymized disclosure of your secret portfolio holdings. Fidelity Investments has one too. Yahoo Finance reported on the both of them in The Struggle to Profit From Investor Emotion.
The American Association of Individual Investors publishes its own survey, but this is based on freely given opinions, not taken from private portfolios. It is updated frequently.
If you want to pay for emotion measurements, you could try www.sentimentrader.com, a newsletter that covers broad ground, with over 20 different indicators that they track.
Then there are the social media-based funds. A supposedly Twitter-based hedge fund, which never attracted enough money to be a profitable enterprise, was Derwent Capital Markets, but it folded. Picking up the idea, and repackaging so that other people might make the same mistake, is DCM Dealer (advertising at the company website here), where the idea is that retail investors can buy access to the aggregated tweet flow data indicating market sentiment.
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