Is Brisbane Cooling – Australian Property Market – November 2010 Update

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in November published both its House Price Index and its Average Weekly Earnings Index. Let’s therefore have a look if the country which both avoided recession and seems to have a Central Bank that is interested in controlling inflation but which to me looks like it has a bubble of a property market is still as bullish. I say has an interest in controlling inflation. The RBA has been steadily raising its cash target rate over the last year and a half to 4.75%. This is in stark contrast to the Bank of England’s 0.5% who as I’ve described before has no interest in sticking to their inflation remit with inflation now above target for about 40 of the last 50 months. Regular readers of course know that I keep a close eye on Australia as it is still a potential “retirement” location for me even if £1 today only buys a poorly $1.6199.

There’s still plenty of time for -60% – History of Severe Real S&P 500 Stock Bear Markets – November 2010 Update

I haven’t updated my History of Severe Real S&P500 Stock Bear Markets since August 2010. At that time QE Lite had only recently been announced. That strategy kept the dead US patient alive for 3 short months before the next load of stimulus, Money Printing 2 (sorry Quantitative Easing 2). Let’s put the $600 billion involved in QE2 into perspective. It’s the equivalent of $1,950 for every US man, woman and child. I was always taught “that nothing comes for free”. In parallel to this I also can’t help but think about Newton’s first law, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. As an Average Joe I’m just wondering what the penalty and opposite reaction will be. I guess time will tell but I still can’t help thinking it’s not going to be good.

It must be nearly bonus time and the S&P 500 cyclically adjusted PE (PE10 or CAPE) – November 2010 Update

If you’re a bank, particularly a bailed out tax payer owned bank, who’s about to pay out £7 billion or so in bonuses (which is the equivalent of £113 for every man, woman and child in the UK), while everyone else in the country is going through austerity and slowly being made redundant, then you have a seriously hard sell on your hands if you don’t want to be lynched. Before announcing the bonuses you need to get your PR machine into gear and show the general public that you’re not immoral or greedy but instead a warm and loveable organisation who cares about the general public and wants to help society as a whole.

No nonsense FTSE 100 cyclically adjusted PE ratio update – October 2010

No ramblings from me today. It’s just a simple update of the FTSE 100 cyclically adjusted PE (CAPE or PE10).

The first chart shows that with the nominal FTSE 100 price moving from 5371 to 5592.9, an increase of 4.1%, over the month the PE10 ratio has also risen from 13.5 to 14.1. This is still well below the FTSE 100 PE10 20 Percentile of 17.0 while the 80 Percentile is 23.7. The long run average is now 19.9 for the dataset shown in the chart. The correlation between the PE10 and the Real (inflation adjusted by the CPI) FTSE Price is a strong 0.70.

The challenges of value investing

Unlike some people out there I am not a value investor in the true sense of the word. That is I don’t go looking for individual stocks which through the use of valuation metrics appear under priced. I would more class myself as a pseudo value investor. My strategy is to be either under weight or over weight equities depending on whether the market appears over or under valued using the cyclically adjusted PE ratio (CAPE or PE10). I now track this for 3 markets:
- The UK FTSE 100 CAPE
- The US S&P 500 CAPE
- The Australian ASX 200 CAPE