WA few weeks before Christmas, Patrick Hussy suddenly became suspicious. Hussy’s company, Sentix Asset Management, has been evaluating investor sentiment for many years. Your regular survey of a total of 5,000 private and professional investors gives you a fairly reliable picture of what’s bothering people on the stock exchanges. But what Hussy read from his annual surveys at the end of 2021 was something he had never seen since he first asked about it in 2015. Investors should formulate their return expectations for the coming year: Eight percent were given by private investors as a value for 2022 and 5.2 percent by professional investors. They had never set such high expectations before. “We saw a hint of greed,” says Hussy.
Nothing good was in store for the expert. Because on the stock exchange, as in life, there is a simple psychological connection: the greater the expectation in advance, the greater the disappointment afterwards when things turn out completely differently than expected. The first stock market weeks of the new year did not go as well as investors might have imagined. The S&P 500, America’s most important stock market barometer, lost around six percent in January, and the Nasdaq index, which specializes in tech stocks, even almost ten percent. The fluctuations in the Dax are not without. Germany’s best-known share barometer has lost more than 1000 points in the meantime, but then recovered again for a few days. So it’s no wonder that there is one word on everyone’s lips on the financial markets that stands for unrest like no other on the stock exchange: we’re talking about volatility.