Big US Stocks’ Q1’24 Fundamentals: Valuations Deeper Into Bubble Territory?

The big US stocks dominating markets and investors’ portfolios continue to thrive. They are finishing up another earnings season covering a record-breaking quarter, reporting some fantastic results. Still, these fat underlying profits are growing far slower than major companies’ soaring stock prices. That has forced valuations deeper into dangerous bubble territory, fueling mounting risks for awakening a new bear market.

As always big US stocks’ latest Q1’24 results are important for gaming stock markets’ likely direction in coming months. For 27 quarters in a row now, I’ve analyzed how the 25 largest US companies that dominate the SPX fared in their latest earnings seasons. Exiting Q1, these behemoths commandedof the SPX’s total market cap! Their latest reported key results are detailed in this table.

Percentage changes are excluded if they aren’t meaningful, primarily when data shifted from positive to negative or vice-versa. Collectively these latest quarterly results from the leading US companies shed light on crucial questions.

But even if Americans had money to burn, their iPhone upgrade cycle is lengthening considerably. New models have marginal improvements, but existing ones continue to run everything fast for several years or more. Social incentives to upgrade are waning too, as all iPhones essentially look the same. People can’t really tell which models their friends are using, so there’s little prestige in pulling out the latest version.

In Q1’24 Berkshire’s bottom-line earnings included $1.9b of investment gains, but a year earlier in Q1’23 those ran a mind-boggling $34.8b! Adjust those out of both quarters, and the next-18-biggest US stocks’ Q1’24 GAAP earnings actually surged a surprising 10.9% YoY! Big pharma were major contributors, with Eli Lilly (NYSE:Leading the way is the GLP-1 agonist drugs for diabetes and weight loss. Eli Lilly’s versions of those are Mounjaro and Zepbound. Sales of the former last quarter hit $1.

Even excluding those big-pharma outliers, the rest of the next-18-biggest US stocks still averaged near-bubble 26.6x P/Es at the end of Q1. The entire US stock markets are dangerously overvalued, with all 500 SPX stocksleaving Q1! That is understated too, as our spreadsheet we use to track those caps individual P/Es at 100x to minimize outlier distortions. The implications of this are ugly..

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