Wells Fargo Securities has introduced the Wells Fargo Animal Spirits Index as an alternative to the S&P500 which has been used in the past as a proxy for animal spirits, a measure of consumer confidence. According to Wells Fargo instead of relying on a single variable, like the consumer confidence index or the S&P 500 index, 'it would be more informative to construct an index based on several indicators to represent different behaviours across major sectors of the econ