Global Valuation Updates!

Quarterly CAPE Ratio Updates!  

Lots of carnage in 2018…how did that affect valuations?  Let’s go right to the stats!

Median CAPE Ratio: 16 (19 a year ago)25% most expensive: 25 (27 a year ago, U.S. in this bucket)25% cheapest 11 (13 a year ago)

Average of Foreign Developed: 19 (22 a year ago)Average of Foreign Emerging 15 (17 a year ago)

We’ve mentioned this note in every update but bears repeating.  We use the MSCI Investable Market Indices below, but MSCI also calculates their Standard Indices too.  IMI includes more companies and in general is more representative of the entire market.  It really makes no difference for any of the countries except the very smallest ones, such as Greece and Egypt.  For both series the CAPE ratios are almost always near identical, with one glaring exception – again, Greece, which depending on the series you use has a CAPE ratio of -3 or 2.

So, this is one reason we have always used a valuation composite across the variables below.  If one is giving a screwy result, or perhaps a market has a structural bias to one variable, we want to average it out.  So, in this case Greece is cheapest on CAPD, CAPB, and CAPCF, just not on CAPE.

The cheap stuff is still dominated by Europe…but some other names have been creeping in over the past year, particularly in Asia…

Here it is in Excel too.

MSCI Investable Market Indices

SECTORS

Good investing,Meb Fabertheideafarm.com