Wednesday marks exactly 10 years to the day that the S&P 500 dropped to 666 in intraday trading, a final plunge lower for stocks that marked the end of a vicious bear market and the start of the current bull market in the eyes of some. Others peg it to the closing low scored three days later on March 9.
Hopefully, you managed to get a piece of the 300% gain the S&P 500 has seen since that March day, because the good times are definitely over says our call of the day, from Steven Jon Kaplan of the True Contrarian blog and newsletter. “U.S. stock indexes like the S&P 500, as measured by price-earnings ratios, price-to-book, and other measures in their entire history going back to the late 1700s, were only more overvalued relative to their earnings twice before: from late 1999 through early 2000 and during August-September 2018,” said Kaplan.
He says investors shouldn’t just sit on their hands right now and offers up some cheap ideas on how to make money while waiting for the boom to come down on Wall Street. True to his blog name, he likes “unpopular” and contrarian ideas, such as an ETF of Indian companies — VanEck Vectors India Small-Cap Index ETF SCIF, +6.34% which he says has one of the lowest price/earnings ratios in the world.
Europe stocks SXXP, -0.02% are largely down across the board. Asia stocks were mostly higher, led by a 1.4% gain for the Shanghai Composite SHCOMP, +1.57%