BEARING DOWN

Huntington Beach-based investment newsletter editor Doug Fabian, a bull since September 1996, flashed the sell signal to his subscribers Tuesday night after his U.S. stock market model turned bearish.

“Whether or not this is a correction or a more serious decline, we still have to wait and see,” said Fabian, editor of Fabian Premium Investment Resource, which has 32,000 subscribers. Its technical model is based on comparing domestic equity indexes with their 200-day moving averages.

Meanwhile, Investors Intelligence’s weekly survey of independent investment newsletter writers nationwide shows that only 43.4% now count themselves as bullish on U.S. stocks, down from 50% a week ago.

The bears now total 31.9%, up from 27.6% a week ago. The remainder think the market is merely in the midst of a short-term correction.

The bulls had reached 54.3% the week of July 20--which, as is usually the case with this sentiment indicator, proved to be a terrific “contrarian indicator”: The market peaked a week earlier.