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Talk of market bubble draws angst, shrugs

Bubble talk is building on Wall Street. Driving the narrative of a stock market inflating at an unsustainable pace is the fact stock prices keep going up, even though the S&P 500 stock index is trading at more than 21 times its earnings over the past four quarters — or 28% higher than its average P-E of 16.6 since 1965, says Oppenheimer, a Wall Street firm.

New all-time highs for the Dow and S&P 500 this week, as well as a continued hot streak for tech stocks, also is fodder for bears who argue that stocks are frothy.

The business press has picked up on the angst. In Sunday’s edition, The New York Times ran a story, “When Will the Tech Bub- ble Burst?” Last month, Business Insider weighed in: “Beware: The stock market trade that could ‘pop the bubble’ by year-end.”

Paul Hickey, co-founder at Bespoke Investment Group, has heard the bubble chatter about the “bull market’s end day being near.” But, for now, he doesn’t buy into the bubble thesis. He refutes the bubble call by comparing today’s market to a real bubble, the one that burst in 2000, ending a 13-year bull run.

While the S&P 500’s current P-E is higher than during a similar phase of the 1987 to 2000 bull, it’s well below the peak P-E of just over 30 in 2000. The S&P tech sector’s gain of nearly 400% in the current bull run, he adds, is far smaller than the 1,323% gain from July 1991 to March 2000. “For the current market to reach true bubble territory, much more needs to happen,” Hickey says.