How to 'read' the market? 4 indicators

Negative sentiment is sweeping through the bourses" is a very common line that you hear in television channels. If anyone were to ask what does it exactly mean? The reply, most likely, would construe lines like, "Since the world markets are doing badly, India has to follow."
Reading the signs
Put and call ratio is a good indicator. High PCR means fear and Low PCR implies optimism
Fund Surveys give pointers on what the investors believe. Majority responses towards any particular trend means the reverse is likely to happen
Mutual Fund Data reflects optimism or pessimism
Buoyant markets, whether primary or secondary, are often attributed to good market sentiment. Conversely, whenever the market pours ice-cold water on the hopes of many a day-trader and futures and option speculator, it is attributed to poor market sentiment.
In fact most market experts clearly say that markets are driven by both fundamentals and sentiment. And the latter is as important as the former.
So, given that the usual suspect in any short-term movement is ascribed to the "sentiment", it might be worth spending some time on the meaning of this word, and more importantly, what are the elements that make up this word in the stock market context.
Investopedia.com defines it as "The feeling or tone of a market (that is, crowd psychology). It is shown by the activity and price movement of securities".
As is apparent from this definition, there is an element of intuition or psychology involved. This can be summarised in just two words: greed and fear.
This aspect is completely neglected by the 'Efficient Market' theorists who propound that all market participants are rational human beings. Behavioural Finance practitioners, however, accord a lot of importance to such psychology.
Though 'sentiment' can be written-off as being largely short-lived, there have been attempts to quantify and pictorially depict these periodic emotional outpourings, through the medium of 'Sentiment Indicators'.
Such indicators attempt to gauge the composite market mood. However, unlike certain trend-following indicators (such as moving averages or trend-line breakouts), sentiment indicators generally are used to signal trend reversals.
Generally speaking, it means that when a sentiment indicator shows an abundance of optimism, investors would be wiser if they approach the market with a higher degree of caution.
The reasoning behind this is rather simple. If the vast majority of investors are very optimistic, then it follows that this positive outlook is getting translated into direct investment by them.
That implies that it would become more difficult progressively to find newer investors that provide an exit route to the existing investors. Therefore, sentiment indicators can point to major turning points in the markET.
Iwill give some assorted examples of sentiment indicators in 2morow edition