QQQ
SPY
The survey drama nobody asked for
Tom Lee from Fundstrat went on the offense Wednesday, saying the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey has become “notoriously partisan.” His beef? The response mix looks heavily tilted, which he argues can warp the headline mood reading the market keeps obsessing over.
Why he thinks the numbers are messy
Lee pointed to a big gap in how Democrats and Republicans are answering the survey, saying that can make the final reading look like the country suddenly fell off a cliff when the real story may be more about who’s responding. He also argued the survey’s broad, perception-based setup gives it plenty of room for interpretation — which is a fancy way of saying it can sometimes feel more like a vibe check than hard science.
Meanwhile, the market keeps doing its own thing
That matters because consumer sentiment is one of those classic macro inputs traders love to overthink. But the stock market has been stubbornly resilient anyway: the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 have both posted solid year-to-date gains, even as worries about inflation and geopolitics keep popping up like annoying app notifications.
The latest University of Michigan read already showed sentiment sinking to a record low in May, and another update is due on Friday, May 22. So if you’re trying to handicap where stocks go next, the fight is basically: do you trust the survey, or the tape?
Big picture: when a macro gauge starts looking more like a political Rorschach test than a clean economic signal, investors have to decide whether they’re trading the data — or just the drama.