firms have recently issued far more shares of their stock (either through initial public offerings or secondary offerings) than they did even in the go-go years of the late 1990s and at the top of the Internet bubble in early 2000.
That's not good news, from a contrarian point of view: The stock market historically has tended to perform poorly following periods in which firms have flooded the market with more shares.
...TrimTabs next focused on those months in which not only did total corporate issuance exceed $30 billion, but also those in which total corporate share purchases were less. The S&P 500's average 90-day return following those months was a loss of 7%.
This more-narrowly-defined subset applies to today, unfortunately. According to TrimTabs, corporate new offerings since the beginning of May have been nearly five times greater than corporate purchases.
Ned Davis, the head of Ned Davis Research has found through his research that it is optimal not to focus on monthly totals but instead on a rolling 13-week window. On this basis, according to Davis, recent corporate issuance has been exceeded historically only by two other occasions -- early 2000 and early 2008.
Those were "not great times to buy stocks," Davis notes dryly.