by David Merkel, Aleph Blog
Idea Credit: Philosophical Economics Blog || I get implementation credit, which is lessā¦ 😉
Are you ready to earn 6%/year until 9/30/2026? Ā The data from the Federal Reserve comes out with some delay. Ā If I had it instantly at the close of the third quarter, I would have said 6.37% ā but with the run-up in prices since then, the returns decline to 6.01%/year.
That puts us in the 82nd percentile of valuations, which isnāt low, but isnāt the nosebleed levels last seen in the dot-com era. There are many talking about how high valuations are, but investors have not responded in frenzy mode yet, where they overallocate stocks relative to bonds and other investments.
Think of it this way: as more people invest in equities, returns go up to those who owned previously, but go down for the new buyers. Ā
The businesses themselves throw off a certain rate of return evaluated at replacement cost, but when the price paid is far above replacement cost the return drops considerably even as the cash flows from the businesses do not change at all.
For me, to get to a level where I would hedge my returns, we would be talking aboutĀ considerably higher levels where the market is discounting future returns of 3%/year ā we donāt have that type of investor behavior yet.
One final note: sometimes I like to pick on the concept of Dow 36,000 because the authors didnāt get the concept of risk premia, or, margin of safety. Ā They assumed the market could be priced to no margin of safety, and with high growth. Ā That said, the model does offer a speculative prediction of Dow 36,000. Ā It just happens to come around the year 2030.
Until next time, when we will actually have some estimates of post-election behaviorā¦ happy investing and remember margin of safety.
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