Assessing the stock market after one of the fastest declines and subsequent comebacks in history

Stocks that started this way include Virgin Galactic and DraftKings.Then there are the sentiment readings that are neutral, ambiguous or offsetting.The equity-exposure of the discretionary money managers in the National Association of Active Investment Management survey is around neutral, at 57% and in fact has receded from its rebound-rally highs.Source: NAAIMAnd the gauges constructed to capture risk appetites and investor positioning more broadly are in some disagreement.Citigroup strategist Tobias Levkovich keeps a Panic-Euphoria indicator, based on several market-activity readings, that last week bumped up against the Euphoria zone, a threshold designed to reflect a high probability that the S&P 500 will be lower in 12 months' time.And yet Bank of America's Michael Hartnett keeps a weekly Bull & Bear Indicator — encompassing fund positioning, credit-market technicals, fund flows and stock-market breadth — which has remained pinned at zero, the maximum bearish level, for three weeks.Boil it all down and it's fair to say investors collectively are undecided on the path for stocks and the economy, in a market that's both up a lot and beaten down, with extraordinary liquidity support from the Federal Reserve, but companies borrowing heavily simply to cover costs.The sometimes-whippy rotation from the dominant winners (mega-cap growth, biotech, gold, Internet stocks) to depressed laggards (banks, small-caps, energy) shows the game is largely in the hands of systematic investing programs pinging between momentum tactics and mean-reversion bets.Forced to characterize sentiment, it seems more cautious than confident.