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Think what you will of former President Barack Obama, he was a great investor-in-chief.

On March 3, 2009, days before the start of the amazing bull market rally that turns eight this week, he told us that stocks had gotten so cheap they looked like a good deal.

Eight years on, the S&P 500 Index SPX, -0.23% is up 249%. Its posted a compound annual growth rate that would make Warren Buffett smile: 13%.

Now that the market has risen so much, apparently on expectations of business-friendly reforms from President Donald Trump, Id love to know what Obama thinks about whether to buy or sell, given his record.

Alas, we dont know his market view. The truth is, whatever he thinks might be tainted by partisanship. Theres a lot of that going around now. As an investor, you should try to avoid this pitfall, especially if you are on the left. Buffett, who backed Hillary Clinton, recently quipped that for half of his adult life this country had a president he didnt vote for, but that never kept him out of stocks.

But it feels like its time to sell. After all, Trump appears unpredictable, to put it mildly. And at least two signals are telling us to be cautious about this rally.

1. Insiders are bleak

We may no longer have Obama to help us with market guidance, but we can turn to other higher-ups: corporate insiders. The news is bleak for bulls. Insiders are selling this rally hard so hard theyre driving insider sentiment into extremely bearish territory.

Read: In stocks, nearly every type of active manager got worse at their job in 2016

The selling has pummeled an eight-week sell-buy ratio tracked by Vickers Weekly Insider, which analyzes insider activity. It is up to 6.3 from around 3 at the start of November. Insiders have continually stepped up selling, relative to buying, in the post-election rally. The current sentiment reading is solidly bearish, says David Coleman, of Vickers Weekly Insider.

2. Investors may be too bullish

I like to watch investor sentiment for contrarian signals. After all, the best time to buy is when investors are frightened. And a good time to sell is when investors are exuberant. This means there are fewer people left to come in to buy your shares and drive them higher. Besides, in the market, the crowd is often wrong.

Here too, though, we see bad news for bulls. Various sentiment measures I track show lots of optimism.

The Investors Intelligence bull-bear ratio, a measure of stock-newsletter-writer sentiment, rose to 3.82 last week. Generally, anything above 4 is a big red flag. The National Association of Active Investment Managers survey shows an allocation to stocks of 102%, the second-highest level on record. Put buying, a signal of bearishness, is low relative to call buying, which signals optimism.

Still too early to dump the Trump bump

Even though insiders are negative and investors are extremely optimistic often a bad combination for bulls its still too early to sell the Trump bump in the market. Heres why.

First, the insiders. Like many investment analysts, Coleman at Vickers Weekly Insider cautions investors against making decisions on the basis of insider sentiment alone. Insiders can be early. Markets can rally for a while even though they are negative.

Next, while sentiment seems very high, its not high across the board. There are several exceptions that suggest we arent at extremes, maintains Bruce Bittles, the chief investment strategist at Baird. I dont think theres enough optimism to overwhelm the trend in the market, which is decidedly bullish. You need more optimism than this to stop a market that has broken out of a trading range. Thats because, for him, the optimism is not deep-seated.

Also see: Bull markets eight-year anniversary reminds us that the Dow rewards the bold

Retail investors, for example, are still relatively cautious, he points out. The number of bulls in the American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) survey recently stood at 37.9%, which is below average.

The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds is still around where it was in the fourth quarter of 2016, suggesting bond vigilantes are cautious on economic growth.

And the financial media remain cautious. Journalists are worth watching for a sentiment read, because they are often very good contrarian indicators. Theyre not necessarily dumb. Theyre just good at knowing what people want to read about. That makes them a good reflection of investor mood.

And, tellingly, the mood in the press remains skeptical of this rally. Nobody wants to talk about the market going higher, says Bittles. Every reporter I talk with is trying to get me to say the market is going to go down because of the uncertainty. But the uncertainty is what drives a market higher.

Here, Bittles is referring to the adage: The markets like to climb a wall of worry. Thats another way of saying you need cautious investors on the sidelines to come in and drive your stocks higher. The cautious media mood is telling us thats still the case.

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Opinion: Will Trump top Obama as investor-in-chief? - MarketWatch