Is it possible that stocks aren't overpriced? Financial adviser Josh Brown raises the possibility, arguing that earnings can grow into their prices. After all, Amazon, Netflix, and Nvidia have seemed overpriced to investors for a long time, but their economic performance keeps improving. As Brown puts it, with all of these stocks in the recent past, “[t]he fundamental stories grew up to justify the valuations investors had already been paying (Brown's emphasis).”
And this can also happen to entire markets. Five years ago, the market's cyclically adjusted P/E ratio (CAPE or Shiller PE) was higher than it had been in 87% of all readings up until that point. But the stock market has been up 90% since then. “No one could have known that the fundamentals would arrive to back up the elevated valuations for stocks eventually,” according to Brown.
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