S&P 500 High Risk Periods

Courtesy of Prometheus Market Insight

Our Secular Trend Score (STS) and Cyclical Trend Score (CTS) are calculated using a large basket of fundamental, technical, internal and sentiment data. The historical data used by our models extend back to the market crash in 1929 and have enabled our STS to correctly identify every secular inflection point and our CTS to correctly identify more than 90 percent of all cyclical inflection points during the last 85 years. Additionally, when analyzed collectively, these data identify extremes in the risk/reward profile of the stock market from an investment perspective. Since early 2013, stock market investment risk has remained in the highest one percentile of all historical observations, and the latest speculative surge during the last year has increased overall risk to one of the highest levels ever recorded, joining a select group of three time periods that includes the long-term tops in 1929 and 2000.

 As we often stress, this particular measurement of investment risk is not a top call or an indication that a severe market decline is imminent. Overbought rallies such as this one can remain overbought for a long time as speculative momentum carries prices to higher and higher extremes. What the current investment risk/reward profile tells us is that a severe market decline will almost certainly occur after the current cyclical bull market terminates. In his latest weekly commentary, fund manager John Hussman reviews another data set that indicates stock market valuations have now exceeded those at the previous bubble peak in 2000. We have included an excerpt from his commentary below, although we would highly recommend reading the entire article.
At bull market peaks, investors typically fail to recognize cyclically elevated profit margins, assuming that those margins are permanent and that earnings can be taken at face value. If there is one thing that separates our views here from the bulk of Wall Street analysis, it is the historically-informed insistence that investors are mistakenly banking on record-high profit margins to be permanent. For more on this, including evidence that historical profit margin dynamics remain quite on track and have not changed a whit, see The Coming Retreat in Corporate Earnings, and An Open Letter to the FOMC: Recognizing the Valuation Bubble in Equities.
While the evidence may be alarming to some, make no mistake: The median price/revenue multiple for S&P 500 constituents is now significantly higher than at the 2000 market peak. The average price/revenue multiple across S&P 500 constituents is now above every point in that bubble except the first and third quarters of 2000. Only the capitalization-weighted price/revenue multiple – presently at about 1.7 – is materially below the price/revenue multiple of 2.2 reached at the 2000 peak. That’s largely because S&P 500 market capitalization was dominated by high price/revenue technology stocks in 2000. [Geek's Note: as a result, if one chooses a universe of stocks by first sorting by market capitalization, one will probably find that price/revenue multiples of those stocks are lower today than in 2000]. Regardless, the historical norm for the capitalization-weighted S&P 500 price/revenue ratio is only about 0.80, less than half of present levels. The fact is that unless current record-high profit margins turn out to be permanent, against all historical experience to the contrary, the overvaluation of the broad equity market is equal or more extreme today than it was at the 2000 bubble peak.

This has been posted for Educational Purposes Only.   Do your own work and consult with Professionals before making any investment decisions. 

Past performance is not indicative of future results.