Discordant is the best way to describe the markets right now. Under the backdrop of leading central banks rolling out opposing policies, markets have been rising and falling.
It’s good when the unemployment rate is low, right? Of course it is. The problem is that super-low unemployment often comes at the end of the good times, not the beginning.
In what was expected to be a relatively uneventful Fed meeting a few short days ago, the June FOMC gathering turned into a headline-making event instead.
Since the end of 2019, S&P 600 price returns have been a respectable 21% or 8.2% annualized. This return hasn’t come close to matching 87% EPS growth, which has meant the P/E ratio of the index has contracted from 20.2 times to 13.1 times.