Overvalued, not Expensive

by David Merkel, Aleph Blog

This is my quarterly update on how much the market is likely to return over the next 10 years.  At the end of the last quarter, that figure was around 6.54%/year.  For comparison purposes, that is at the 77th percentile of outcomes — high, but not nosebleed high, which to me, is when the market is priced to return 3% or less.  That’s when you run.

Adding in quarter to date movements, the current value should be near 6.3%/year (79th percentile).

With all of the hoopla over how high the market is, why is this measure not screaming run?  This is because average investors, retail and institutional, are not as heavily invested in the equity markets as is typical toward the end of bull markets.  There are many articles calling for caution — I have issued a few as well.

From an asset-liability management standpoint, bull markets get particularly precarious when caution is thrown to the wind, and people genuinely believe that there is no alternative to stocks — that you are missing out on “free money” if you are not invested in stocks.

We aren’t there now.  So, much as I am not crazy about the present state of the credit cycle (debts rising, income falling), there is still the reasonable possibility of more gains in the stock markets.

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For more on this series, see the first four articles in this search, which describe the model, and its past estimates.

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