What are your favourite ways to judge sentiment in a market (especially stocks)? Media headlines, trader message boards, short interest, put/call ratios, VIX, price action, whatever.
Whose "sentiment" do you mean? Perhaps it makes sense to consider different trading styles as distinct? Investors' sentiment? Perhaps you can't get a reading on investors' sentiment from stuff like intraday price action .... news headline's might be better for investors' sentiment. HFTs' / Systematic autotraders' sentiment? Hmmm ... not sure about that one ... Intraday retail non-auto traders' sentiment? ... Market makers' / dealers' sentiment? .... Swing traders' sentiment? ...
The market sentiment can be known by looking at the larger time frame chart and the most common way of finding the trend is by looking at the candlestick charts and their open and close values. If the close is higher than the open confirms the bull and if the close is lower than the open price then we can say its bearish.
But we cannot predict or know the sentiment by just one or 2 candles. We have to look the overall behavior of a pair or commodity for some days. Just look at gold and you can say at 1 second that it is bearish.