Yuval,
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Believe it or not, I actually hope you’re right about the Fed Put going up in smoke during the next recession. I agree that the Fed’s power is overestimated these days (…a late-Bull symptom), and as such I think the Fed only can dominate markets as long as the investors believe that it dominates markets. The explosion of that belief in a cleansing recession will once more facilitate meaningful price discovery.
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I am in agreement with you about the worthlessness of most sentiment indicator readings. However, and I think you might agree with this because of your Chaikin reference, in my view a large number of mainstream sentiment indicators become valuable at their extremes. Breadth most of the time is meaningless, but when a large number of breadth indicators are printing extremes - and a bunch of them really, really did in September 2018 - then they become valuable. The downturn in the last months of 2018 was without a doubt predictable on the basis of August-September’s extreme sentiment indicators. The same goes for RSI, advance/decline, advancing volume/declining volume, etc. Usually worthless, but incredibly valuable whenever they are registering extremes.
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If you do want to continue to rely on economic fundamentals, I suggest recessionalert.com. The site was down today, but Dwaine Van Vuuren is a trustworthy researcher whose WLEI has been more reliable in the past than unemployment, the yield curve and a bunch of other single indicators in predicting recession. But I’ve lost a lot of confidence post-2008 that fundamentals will matter going forward in the way they did during past recessions.