Link to: Market Peaks are a Process
It’s fascinating how investors come to forget that markets move in cycles and not perpetual diagonal lines. As value investor Howard Marks wrote in The Most Important Thing, "Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one." A normal, run-of-the mill cyclical bear market wipes out more than half of the preceding bull market advance. We should not be surprised at all to see the S&P 500 back at 2010 levels or below over the completion of the present cycle. From a valuation standpoint, we estimate that the S&P 500 Index would have to fall to the 1000 level to bring prospective 10-year nominal total returns toward their historical norm of about 10% annually.