Money and Finance
- Links
Q&A with Guy Spier about his book, The Education of a Value Investor (LINK) Buffett’s Private Analysis of Geico in 1976: ‘Extraordinary’ But ‘Mismanaged’ [H/T Lincoln] (LINK) Aswath Damodaran on corporate break-ups, using EBay and PayPal...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Short Horizon, Long Horizon
Over history, and including the past decade, properly normalized valuations have remained a powerful guidepost for full-cycle and long-term returns, particularly on the horizon of 7-10 years. On that front, the current price/revenue multiple of the S&P...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Siren's Song Of The Unfinished Half-cycle
Given the extent and maturity of the recent advance, it’s very odd that analysts are now beginning to toss around the idea that stocks have entered a secular bull market. These notions are based not on the level of valuation, nor on the duration of...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Begging For Trouble
With the daily focus on European crisis and the hope of central bank intervention, one of the essential features of the investment climate – at least for long-term investors – is easy to lose in the shuffle. That feature is valuation. It’s an easy...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: A False Sense Of Security
One of the aspects of the market that is most likely to confuse investors here is the wide range of opinions about valuation, with some analysts arguing that stocks are cheap or fairly valued, and others - including Jeremy Grantham, Albert Edwards, and...
Money and Finance
Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Coming Retreat in Corporate Earnings
We should begin with an observation. If one examines the historical data, there is a very weak relationship between year-to-year changes in earnings and year-to-year changes in the stock market. This lack of relationship partly reflects the fact that stock prices often recover from recessions quite briskly well before earnings advance, and stock prices often collapse well before earnings do. But even accounting for these leads and lags, the relationship between cyclical fluctuations in the S&P 500 and S&P 500 earnings is simply not very strong.
My concern at present is emphatically not simply a concern about the near-term direction of earnings, or any assumption that stocks must closely follow earnings. Rather, my present concern is much more secular in nature. It can be expressed very simply: investors are taking current earnings at face value, as if they are representative of long-term flows, at a time when current earnings are more unrepresentative of those flows than at any time in history. The problem is not simply that earnings are likely to retreat deeply over the next few years. Rather, the problem is that investors have embedded the assumption of permanently elevated profit margins into stock prices, leaving the market about 80-100% above levels that would provide investors with historically adequate long-term returns. An equivalent way to say this is that stocks are currently at levels that we estimate will provide roughly zero nominal total returns over the next 7-10 years, with historically adequate long-term returns thereafter.
- Links
Q&A with Guy Spier about his book, The Education of a Value Investor (LINK) Buffett’s Private Analysis of Geico in 1976: ‘Extraordinary’ But ‘Mismanaged’ [H/T Lincoln] (LINK) Aswath Damodaran on corporate break-ups, using EBay and PayPal...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Short Horizon, Long Horizon
Over history, and including the past decade, properly normalized valuations have remained a powerful guidepost for full-cycle and long-term returns, particularly on the horizon of 7-10 years. On that front, the current price/revenue multiple of the S&P...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: The Siren's Song Of The Unfinished Half-cycle
Given the extent and maturity of the recent advance, it’s very odd that analysts are now beginning to toss around the idea that stocks have entered a secular bull market. These notions are based not on the level of valuation, nor on the duration of...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Begging For Trouble
With the daily focus on European crisis and the hope of central bank intervention, one of the essential features of the investment climate – at least for long-term investors – is easy to lose in the shuffle. That feature is valuation. It’s an easy...
- Hussman Weekly Market Comment: A False Sense Of Security
One of the aspects of the market that is most likely to confuse investors here is the wide range of opinions about valuation, with some analysts arguing that stocks are cheap or fairly valued, and others - including Jeremy Grantham, Albert Edwards, and...