From CitiFX:
The Magazine Cover Indicator is a belief commonly held by financial market participants that when a financial story or market theme is displayed on the cover of a magazine, that theme or the related trend is near exhaustion. In other words, magazine covers are believed to be reverse indicators.
Two very famous examples are when BusinessWeek’s cover screamed: “The Death of Equities”, at the stock market lows in 1979 and when The Economist proclaimed the world to be: “Drowning in Oil” just as oil bottomed in 1999. Two other famous examples of the Magazine Cover Indicator are the appearance of Jeff Bezos as Time’s Man of the Year in 2000 just before the tech bubble burst and Russian President Vladimir Putin as Man of the Year in 2007 right before the collapse of oil brought down the Russian economy.