It looks like the correction in the S&P 500 Index (SPX) may have started…at least people on Twitter believe it has.  Daily Twitter Sentiment recorded a print of nearly -19 today.  That is just shy of the -20 that would mark a negative initiation thrust for SPX. In the past, extreme negative readings near a turning point in the market has resulted in at least several days of selling.

Smoothed sentiment gave its first warning of a downturn on Tuesday when it broke its confirming uptrend line after a negative divergence from price.  Today it fell below zero.  This reflects several days of market participants selling into higher prices and tweeting about it.  If you look at the chart below you can see that traders lost faith in this rally almost two weeks ago as SPX pushed up into the 1490 area.  At that point we started to see a series of lower highs on daily sentiment and a negatively diverging peak in smoothed sentiment. Now that smoothed sentiment is below zero we have all the conditions in place to make the odds favor lower prices over the near term.  Traders are currently targeting 1470 as the most likely area for a bounce.  We’ll do an update here or on Twitter @DownsideHedge if the picture changes.