No. of Recommendations: 25
Trying to assess t he tea leaves is a bit of a hobby of mine.
My "predictors" directory tree has 1078 spreadsheets in it.
The two biggest conclusions from my noodling:
Of all of the time frames you might try to predict, one year forward is about the hardest.
And a calendar year is even harder, since that's how all the professionals get evaluated ("Show me the incentive...") So I won't even speculate.
Shorter term, momentum really skews the odds pretty far away from randomness. Since the market just put in a recent high, the chances of a big and lasting drop within the next 2-5 months is well below average. It's probably safe to stay in the water for now. It seems that euphoria fades only slowly among market participants, who are by nature optimists. (pessimists don't buy stocks at all)
Average S&P 500 real total return in the next six months across starting dates since 1980, based on the number of days since the most recent short term high of the nominal index:
Under a month: +11.6% (as now)
1-3 months: +8.3%
3-6 months: +4.5%
over 6 months: -3.6%
Those are absolute returns, not annualized rates. So...first half of the year statistically likely to be decent, or at least the first few months.
Longer term, valuation metrics look pretty terrible, so the next 3-10 years are likely to be below average. But valuation is a pretty useless predictor of market returns in the next year, so that doesn't help us. If trends of real earnings and valuations remain similar to recent history, based history since 1995 you'd expect a ~7 year forward return from the S&P of inflation + 2.9%/year if valuations end at around the average 1995-2023 levels. That's because today's valuation level seems to be about 16% higher than the average since 1995 based on smoothed earnings. Higher based on sales.
So, bottom line:
Way less than a year, good.
Way more than a year, bad.
Right about a year: no clue. The tea leaves all stayed in the pot.
Jim
