Consider the latest readings from the Hulbert Stock Newsletter Sentiment Index (HSNSI), which reflects the average stock market exposure among a subset of short-term stock market timing newsletters that are tracked by the Hulbert Financial Digest. As of Monday night, the HSNSI stood at 47.6%.

That's down some six percentage points from where it stood a week ago, when I last devoted a column to newsletter sentiment.

But the most telling comparison is not with where the HSNSI stood a week ago. The HSNSI has now fallen back to a level not seen since September, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was nearly 1,000 points lower.

To put that in perspective, consider where we would have guessed sentiment would be today if, in September, we had imagined the Dow to be 1,000 points higher in five months' time. As you go through that imaginary exercise, recall the Dow had still not broken above its early 2000 high.

My guess is that we would have imagined that sentiment would have been higher a lot higher.

The fact that it is not is bullish, according to contrarians, since it suggests that current sentiment conditions are closer to the wall of worry that bull markets like to climb than they are to the slope of hope on which bear markets thrive.

I have some additional, highly anecdotal, evidence of a wall of worry: The e-mails I received in response to a short piece I wrote early Monday about the inverted yield curve in the U.S. In that short piece, I reported an argument from Standard & Poor's about why the inverted yield curve might not be the cause for concern that it otherwise would appear to be.

I don't want to focus here on arguments that were made in the e-mails that I received, both for and against, many of which were cogent and well-reasoned. Instead, what is of interest from the point of view of contrarian analysis is that more than 90% of the e-mails I received took issue with S&P's argument.

My guess is that if we were closer to a market top, and irrational exuberance had replaced the wall of worry, the ratio would have been just the reverse.