Where Are We Today? 

Today stocks may appear cheap at first glance, at least if you look at valuations of the late 1990s. They are not! To minimize the impact of cyclical profit volatility, let's first take a look at stock market historical and current valuations, based on 10-year trailing earnings, as shown in Exhibit 6. This way we capture a full economic cycle.

Exhibit 6

The conclusions we can draw are:

• Secular bull markets end at P/Es much above average. The 1982-2000 bull market ended at the highest valuations ever!
• Secular range-bound markets ended when P/Es were below average.
• Markets spent very little time at what is known to be a "fairly valued" state of 15 times 12-month trailing earnings. Historically, stocks only saw average valuations on the way from one extreme to the other. From 1900 to 2006 the S&P 500 spent less than 27% of the time between P/Es of 13 and 17.
• Today, after eight years of plentiful volatility and no returns, what the WSJ called a "lost decade," stocks are not cheap. If you look at ten-year trailing earnings, they are still at levels where previous range-bound markets started.  In other words, based on 10-year trailing earnings, stocks are still at 64% above their average stated valuations.

Now, if you look at historical valuations where P/Es are computed based on one-year trailing earnings (see Exhibit 7), the picture is not that exciting but less grim. At about 18 times trailing earnings, US stocks don't appear that expensive.

Exhibit 7

Unfortunately, the cheapness argument falls on its face once you realize that (pretax) profit margins are hovering at an all-time high of 11.5%, about 35% above their historical (since 1980) average of 8.5%. Similarly to P/Es, profit margins are extremely mean-reverting. As companies start to earn above-average economic profits, new competition waltzes in and competes these excess profits away - arrivederci fat profit margins. Once this happens, the "E" in the "P/E" equation will decline as well, and P/Es will rise from 18 to 22. An additional point: as you see in Exhibit 8, margins don't have to revert and stop at the mean; historically they've gone below the mean - that is how the mean is created. (In the February 4th, 2008 issue of Barron's I rebuffed common arguments against profit-margin mean reversion.)

Exhibit 8

As a side note: The bulk of excesses in overall profit margins, 54.5% to be exact (see Exhibit 9), were in "stuff" stocks (i.e., energy, materials, and industrials). Profit margins will deflate when the global economy slows down. This goes far beyond oil and commodities. Companies that make "stuff," which historically have been very cyclical (today is no different) have benefitted from tremendous operational leverage that contributed to considerable improvement in margins. However, leverage works both ways: lower sales and high fixed costs will push margins to the other extreme.

Exhibit 9

Financials were responsible for 22% of the excess in margins, as they benefitted from tremendous liquidity hosed down by the Fed over recent years; now they are drowning in it. Their margins are compressing at a faster rate than you can read this.

Finally, the "new" economy stocks are responsible for 17% of the excess. However, I'd argue that these industries have transformed substantially since 1988, so that higher-margin software and services now account for a much larger portion of technology and telecom sales. It is kind of like Microsoft (ironically the "new" economy) vs. IBM in 1988: the hardware company (the old economy) vs. the new. Of course IBM of today is lot more of a software and service company than the hardware company it was in the 1980s. Thus the "new" economy stocks should have higher margins than they did in 1988, but by how much? I don't know, but they likely will face a lower margin compression than "stuff" and financials.

The bottom line: Remember those long-term double-digit returns you were promised by stock market gurus during the last bull market? Well, an average passive buy-and-hold investor will be lucky to have very low single-digit returns for the long term. In fact, during the last 1966-1982 range-bound market, investors received almost zero real total returns.

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