Caution: We Are Entering A "Prove It" Market

 

• In my recently released book, The HIdden Power of Rising Dividends,(available at Amazon) I make the case that dividend growth is highly correlated with price growth for many stocks and indices.

• In the book, I suggest that dividend growth alone is highly correlated with price growth for 25-35% of S&P 500 stocks. For an additional 50% of stocks, dividend growth is the most important indicator of value, but the correlation scores rise when we add some portion of sales and earnings growth, along with changes in interest rates.

• The consensus view of many stock market prognosticators today is that stocks, now trading at 27 time operating earnings, are extremely overpriced and are due for a big correction.

• My S&P 500 valuation model is telling a much more balanced story:

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• The above chart is what I call a Value Bar chart. The green bars show my model's annual predicted price of the S&P 500 going back to 2005. A quick look at the bar farthest to the right on the chart shows the model's current predicted price of the S&P 500. That figure is approximately 5,400. With the current price of the S&P 500 at around 6,000, the model is saying stocks are overvalued by about 10%. That, however, is before we factor in 2024 year end earnings and 2025 forward earnings.

•  Before we take a deeper look at the current predicted price, let's look back over the years to see how the model has fared.

• Simply speaking, if the red line (actual price) is above its corresponding Value Bar, we would say stocks are overvalued. If the the red line is lower that the Value Bar for the same year, we would say stocks are undervalued. For the last 20 years, the red line has stayed very close to the top of the Value Bars. A significant divergence is evident in only 2007, 2008,and 2022. In almost all other years, the Value Bars and actual prices of the S&P 500 are very close.

• Stocks continued to climb heading into the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007. At some point during the year, the model would have issued an overvalued signal. The model clearly signaled the market was overvalued in 2008.

• After the bear market of 2008 and 2009, the Value Bars stayed in fairly-valued or undervalued territory until the end of 2021, when they gave an overvalued reading. That signal correctly foresaw the selloff in 2022.

• That brings us to the current modest overvaluation. Plugging in Wall Street's current estimates of sales, earnings, dividends, and interest rates give us a figure of 6,500. 

• We are now entering what I call a "Prove It" market. This means, tech stocks, where the majority of the growth is coming from, must "Prove It" that they can continue with mid 20% sales and earnings growth. If they do, we should have another pretty good year. If not . . . .
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If any of you would like to discuss this article privately, please email me at info@gregdonaldson.com.

The Great P/E Debate: A Stopped Clock and Other Wild Eyed Guesses

We have shown in previous blogs that much of what academia and Wall Street tell us about how to calculate the most foolproof price-to-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 at any point in time is . . .well, foolish.

1. Professor Robert Shiller, the creator of the CAPE method of valuing stocks, which has many academic adherents, says that stocks are wildly overvalued.  The only problem is he has been saying that for nearly six years, and in interviews, he cautions that CAPE is not a good metric for timing.  But, professor, what good is a valuation metric if it is correct only once every decade, or so?  That sounds a bit like the accuracy of a dead clock: it's correct twice a day but fails at telling time during the other 23 hours 59 minutes and 58 seconds of the day.  CAPE currently suggests that the S&P 500 P/E is approximately 80% above it fair value.  

2. There is another crowd of soothsayers who hold to the idea that the long-term average P/E of the S&P 500 is the correct metric to determine its fair value.  These folks argue that a P/E of 16x is the right multiplier, and, that being the case, at 21.3x, stocks are currently about 33% overvalued.  History shows us that if you would have bought every year when the S&P 500 was below a 16x P/E and sold or shorted every year above that level you would have crashed and burned a long time ago.

3. Many on Wall Street believe that the best way to calculate the normal P/E for the S&P 500 is to subtract the rate of inflation from 20.  In our judgement, this crowd has had a better track record over the last 50 years than Dr. Shiller or the 16x crowd, but we have previously shown, there is a more statistically significant way to determine the right P/E at any point in time.  That methodology is what we call the earnings yield to inflation' ratio.  

Our work shows that since the 1960s, earnings yield (the inverse of P/E) minus core inflation has averaged 3.35% with a correlation coefficient of .70.  For our calculations, we use earnings before extraordinary additions or subtractions and the core personal consumption deflator inflation (PCD, the data most favored by the Fed.)  The current reading for these two data points are as follows.  PCD is 1.6% and the trailing 12 month earnings yield is 4.70%, or a P/E of 21.3.  

To determine where the model says the current earnings yield, (P/E) ought to be, we add the current PCD rate of 1.6% to the long-term constant of 3.35%, or 4.95%. Converting this back to P/E, we find the model predicts the correct P/E is now 20.2x.  With the S&P 500 now trading at 21.3 times earnings, that would suggest that stocks might be about five percent overvalued.  But there's more.  The stock market is a discounting mechanism.  That is, it is always looking ahead and pricing in where it believes current financial and economic data will be in the future.  Currently the consensus view of analysts and economists is that the PCD inflation rate will climb to 2% by year end and S&P 500 earnings will grow to approximately 160.  If these estimates come to pass, that would put the fair value of the S&P 500 at about 3200 by year end.  

With the S&P 500 currently sitting at 2727, that would mean it is about 17% undervalued.  That's my best guess and I'm sticking with it no matter how much volatility we see over the next few months. I'll update the model in the coming months. 

Earlier, I said the correlation coefficient on our P/E model is approximately .70.  Being less than 1.00 means that it has not perfectly predicted annual stock market moves (surprise, surprise).  I offer it here because the model is simple and has done a reasonably good job of predicting stock market action over the last few years.  We have another model that has more complexity and with an even higher correlation coefficient that also predicts stocks are undervalued by double digits.  I'll show it in a future blog.
  

The Great P/E Debate: The End Is Not Near, Stocks Are Going Higher

The cacophony of “the end is near” cries from the doom and gloomers is much with us as stocks have marched unrelentingly higher over the last few years.  The doom and gloomers do a lot of talking and shouting, but they don’t seem to do much actual research.  For if they did, they would have discovered a relationship between earnings yields (the inverse of P/E) and inflation that suggests that at a P/E of 21.7x stocks are selling just about where they should be.

The picture below is a screenshot from my Bloomberg terminal showing the historical spreads of the S&P 500’s earnings yield and the personal consumption deflator, the measure of inflation that the Federal Reserve says is most accurate.  Earnings yield, which I define as S&P 500 operating earnings divided by price, or the inverse of P/E, is quoted as a percentage, as is inflation. This produces a visual representation between the two data series that is easy to analyze.

I have written about this relationship as the most important driver of the S&P 500 and Dow Jones 30 price-to-earnings ratios for many years.  I first discovered the relationship between earnings yield and inflation in the 1990s via some data that Value-Line provided their subscribers.  I was surprised that of all the data that I studied, inflation was the most highly correlated with earnings yield.  I would have bet almost anything that interest rates would have proven to have had the best correlation. (I will show the current picture of earnings yield and interest rates later.).   

 

In the upper left-hand side of the picture, you can see the movements of inflation versus earnings yield charted on a quarterly basis going back to 1973.  The difference between the two data series is shown in green.  During this time, you will note that the two lines have moved almost on a tit for tat basis and now stand at about 4.6% for earnings yield and 1.4% for inflation.  The data box at the top right of the picture shows that the average difference between earnings yield and inflation during this 43- year period has been about 3.4%.  Right above that data-point is the current difference of about 3.3%.  There is a lot of other data on this picture, but let me direct your attention to two other important indicators.  I have drawn a red arrow (lower right) pointing at R^2 (Correlation).  You can see that the R^2 between the two data series is very high at .705.  R^2 is a statistical measure of fit between two or more data series and calculates that quarterly movements in inflation have been able to predict just over 70% of the movements of earnings yield and thus P/E.  At our firm, we have more complex models using a wide range of other data series that can raise the R^2 up as high as 95%.

The second important indicator to consider is contained in the red circle I have drawn around a faint red asterisk on the lower left-hand side of the picture.  The red asterisk shows the current differential between earnings yield and inflation, and it is sitting just about where we would hope it would be -- on the fair value line.

In summary, trading at 21.7 times operating earnings, stocks are not wildly overvalued, using inflation as the measure of value, and there is no other single data series that I know of that is able to pinpoint P/E with such statistical accuracy.  I think the doom and gloomers are howling in the wind and their doom and gloom will continue to build as stocks go higher. In my judgement, if the current earnings growth continues, inflation would have to rise nearly one percent to roughly 2.5% before stocks would begin to feel headwinds.

Below I have copied a picture of the relationship between earnings yield and interest rates.  You will note the fit between the two data series is much less convincing than that of earnings yield and inflation.  Indeed, the two data series flip flopped positions in the late 1970s and thus have an R^2 of only about .42.