The old ways to measure investor disagreement were broken. Now there's a new one.

Researchers found that the common ways to measure investor disagreement in the stock market do not actually correlate with each other. This means many existing models for predicting stock prices based on disagreement were likely flawed, and a new measure is now available.

Investors and researchers used several different ways to gauge how much disagreement existed in the market. They assumed these measures all pointed to the same thing. It turns out, they did not. This paper introduces a new, more consistent way to measure disagreement. This could lead to more accurate predictions of stock movements.