Late last week, while previewing the November edition of his global fund manager survey, BofA’s Michael Hartnett fondly recalled the most prescient recent installments of his widely-followed monthly poll.

Surveys from August and December of 2024 and polls from February and April of 2025 were all “actionably contrarian,” he said.

In August of last year and again in April of this year (in the aftermath of “Liberation Day”), the surveys suggested it was time to “buy the bears,” as negative sentiment overshot.

In December of 2024 and again two months later, some of the metrics from Hartnett’s monthly poll flagged excessive optimism, handing investors an opportunity to “sell the bulls.”

This month, Hartnett said market participants should be on the lookout for a trio of what he described as “excess bull metrics,” one of which was a further drop in reported fund manager cash levels, which’ve loitered near the lowest on record for months.

Well, guess what? That contrarian metric did indeed slip even further in the November installment, released on Tuesday, to just 3.7%.

The figure above gives you some context. By their own account, fund managers’ cash allocation is as low as it’s ever been. (It was reported lower at 3.5% in February, but remember: This is all anecdotal. We can call 3.7% a “record” low.)

If you’re curious as to how many times cash levels in the poll have ever registered 3.7% or below, the answer’s just 20 in poll data going back nearly a quarter century.

On every previous occasion “stocks fell and Treasurys outperformed in the following one to three months,” Hartnett cautioned.