Here’s an optimistic commentary (not easy to find lately) about stock prices being extremely low with the implicit assumption that psychology and prices will soon improve. Courtesy of Scott Granis, Calafia Beach Pundit , citing the WSJ article What History Tells Us About the Market.
Stocks could be cheaper now than in 1932
There’s an article in today’s WSJ I highly recommend, by Jason Zweig. He compares today with the conditions that prevailed just a few days before the absolute bottom of the stock market in 1932, after prices had fallen almost 90% from their 1929 highs. The summary: many stocks today are trading at levels that rival the ridiculously low valuations that the famous Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, discovered back then. Here are some excerpts:
The nation was in the grip of what U.S. Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills called "the psychology of fear."
More than one out of every 12 companies on the New York Stock Exchange, Graham calculated, were selling for less than the value of the cash and marketable securities on their balance sheets.
Out of 9,194 stocks tracked by Standard & Poor’s Compustat research service, 3,518 are now trading at less than eight times their earnings over the past year — or at levels less than half the long-term average valuation of the stock market as a whole (according to Graham’s calculation methodology).
Nearly one in 10, or 876 stocks, trade below the value of their per-share holdings of cash — an even greater proportion than Graham found in 1932. Charles Schwab Corp., to name one example, holds $27.8 billion in cash and has a total stock-market value of $21 billion.
Those numbers testify to the wholesale destruction of the stock market’s faith in the future.
This market is priced to a belief that we are in the early stages of a profound recession or perhaps even a Depression. If you believe the future is just a tad brighter than that, you should be buying stocks today with abandon.
