Brian WesburyVerified account@wesbury It’s the Day After Christmas and stocks are on sale. S&P 500 selling at roughly 13.1 times 2019 earnings. This is the best buying opportunity investors have seen in years. 5:50 AM - 26 Dec 2018
Every single website I've seen does not show a P/E of 13 or 10 (from another thread). Are you guys imagining something? 18 is the lowest I've seen, ~20 is the highest.
The only real argument I've heard is "this isn't the bottom", but you'll never know that until you're five years past the bottom. You can definitely say that securities are a lot cheaper than they were six months ago. The bottom might continue to fall making things cheaper, but if you were buying XYZ six months ago because you thought it was a well run organization, it's just cheaper now.
What you are looking at is trailing PE ratio's. Others are referring to forward P/E ratio's https://www.yardeni.com/pub/stockmktperatio.pdf
It is just another measure of valuation. All of them have pro's and con's. Some companies have no earnings, at that time trailing PE will be inflated. In shiller PE measure as presented is not very accurate. There was accounting change to measure earnings along the way. In forward PE, estimates keep changing, but atleast does not suffer from PE number of infinity as was the case in 2008 and 2009.