Stocks started Monday in positive territory after taking a break from the selling last week when the Dow (^DJI) and Nasdaq (^IXIC) both rose 2.4%, posting their biggest weekly gains since December and November, respectively. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) meanwhile rose 2.7%, its biggest weekly gain since last July. And indexes tracking sectors that have been hard-hit recently including biotech and Internet stocks climbed more than 3%. Robert Shiller’s take below.
Shiller: CAPE Ratio Is High But You Should Still Own Stocks
So what’s next?
Some market watchers have pointed to Yale professor and Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller’s cyclically-adjusted price/earnings ratio, or CAPE, to raise concerns that stocks are expensive. The Daily Ticker’s Henry Blodget has used this datapoint in his argument that we’re likely to have lousy returns for the next seven to 10 years or possibly a severe pullback shorter term (he points out that valuation measures are a terrible timing tool).
In the accompanying video, Shiller tells us that the “CAPE index is rather high,” but adds that this ratio first achieved public prominence when he and his colleague presented it to the Federal Reserve board in 1996. He says CAPE was kind of high then too, but then it kept going up for almost three more years.
