Investors who bought into stocks around those peaks ended up earning terrible returns over the subsequent 30 years. Forget “stocks for the long run.” They ended up with “stocks for a long face.” The bigger the bubble, the worse returns. And, according to a new research report, we are back there again. U.S. stocks are now about 80% overvalued on certain key long-term measures, according to research by financial consultant Andrew Smithers, the chairman of Smithers & Co. and one of the few to warn about the bubble of the late 1990s at the time. The five dates listed at the start of this article, he says, are the only times since 1802, when data began being tracked, when stocks have been 50% or more overvalued according to these measures. And only two of those bubbles — 1929 and 1999, both of which were followed by disastrous crashes — were bigger than today. That’s right: According to Smithers’s data, we are now in the third biggest bubble in U.S. history. (Oh, to jump ahead slightly, he also suspects it will go up even further before it comes back down.) Smithers bases his analysis on a combination of measures: Subsequent 30-year returns, and a comparison of U.S. stock prices (since 1900) in relation to a key measure called “Tobin’s q,” which looks at how much it would cost to replace corporations’ assets from scratch. The two measures march closely together: For over 100 years, nothing has predicted investors’ future 30-year returns better than to compare the stock market to the q.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 12:17:57 +0000
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