Stock market fell 3 years in the row, halving in value. No positive returns for 12 years were registered.
2/ US broad stock market has registered 4X book value recently, which is the most overvalued reading since the Dot Com bubble.
This is very extreme.
However, many growth companies don't have tangible assets anymore, so it's worth looking at many indicators...
3/ ...especially price to sales which has recently registered a record reading above 2.7X.
Today's valuations are very similar to the late 1990s and early 2000s.
4/ Therefore, combing these valuation metrics has historically given us an ability to predict a "ballpark" return one should expect over the subsequent 10 year period.
Verdict?
The S&P is priced to deliver -2% p.a. into 2030, over the next decade.
Just as bad as the late '99!
5/ What about the traditional Price/Earnings metrics, with various twists?
Forward P/E is around 22X. Median forward P/E is above 20X.
CAPE ratio is above 35X, the highest level since the year 2000 (and higher than 1929).
Normal P/E has ticked over 37X.
6/ The current greed is probably seen the best by looking at the options market.
The put/call ratio has now fallen to levels last seen in the year 2000.
It isn't a matter of whether stocks will go up or not? Rather, by how much will they go up & how quickly can one get rich?
7/ Insider buying signals are far more important than insider selling signals. There is no doubt about that.
However, consider that insider selling managed to correctly call several intermediate & longer-term tops — from which it took quarters, if not years to recover.
8/ By no means should we completely ignore a strong insider selling ratio — including the current signal which shows most selling since January 2020 (just before the crash).
Together with other indicators presented here, this strengthens the weight of the evidence approach.
II survey gauges sentiment from financial advisors & newsletter editors.
Being a trader for 2 decades, this is one of my go-to indicators & has helped make me good money.
10/ Wall Street analysts are extremely bullish on earnings!
At times, this occurred after a major crash and the markets suffered only a correction before trending higher.
At other times, it occurred near major peaks (2000, 2007, plus 2011 & 2018 for global stocks).
11/ It is easy to sound negative or bearish without any skin in the game, and even more importantly, without a track record of being able to call tops and bottoms.
So what is mine?
12/ On 04th of October 2011, I called a bottom in the US stock market on the day.
Some of my older followers from the ShortSideofLong blog I used to write a decade ago might remember my post.
Here are the screenshots below.
13/ On 19th of February 2020, right on the day of the stock market top, I wrote the following tweet thread:
"We just dialed down our exposure to equities meaningfully. We do not like the risk to reward setup & will let the bus run while we walk instead."
Philosopher Karl Marx & his utopian views of a society where you do the work you can do and take for yourself all the things of necessity you require were pretty crazy in hindsight.
But nowhere as crazy as today's market participants, who believe prosperity can be maintained...
...and controlled by governments & central banks — which will never allow another major downturn or recession to occur on their watch.
If printing money out of thin air is such a great solution in the first place, why do we have taxes? Why do we aim at increasing productivity?
Why don't we just spend all of our time at the beach, or in the ski resorts?
Without any work needed and always waiting for a new batch of freshly printed warm & crisp dollar notes to stimulate our over-indebted economies and pay for our never-ending deficits?
You give the Fed way too much power. They don't have that sort of omnipotence. If they did, they wouldn't let 2008 happen.
What they are doing with cheap money is sawing the seeds for an even bigger day of reckoning in the future. The free market will eventually overwhelm them.
Back in 2007, they had some level of interest rates to cut, and they had ways to go experimenting with other toolbox options, including:
• future guidance
• additional QE
• inflation targeting
Now, governments & CBs they have just about shot all the bullets they can shoot.
After 13 years of experimental monetary/fiscal policies — since 2007 — market participants are convinced central banks and governments exercise full control over business cycles, debt levels, and asset prices.
The view today is, they have your back. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the ways to remove the risk from the speculative activity of real estate & betting on CAP rate compression,
is to focus only on great deals truly priced below market or replacement cost, usually found from distressed sellers & to reduce/remove leverage from the equation.
Also worth mentioning is to focus on the value add as a key driver of appreciation, instead of hoping for market appreciation.
The forced appreciation component that our family has focused on is construction, which is an edge to increase profits without speculation.
Benjamin Graham said:
"A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it."
The same is true in real estate or other assets.
Instead of hoping for a higher exit price, buy at a lower entry price and exit at the market.