The Folly of Ruling Out a Collapse

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A remarkable feature of extended bull markets is that investors come to believe – even in the face of extreme valuations – that the world has changed in ways that make steep market losses and extended periods of poor returns impossible. Among all the bubbles in history, including the 1929 bubble, the late-1960’s Go-Go bubble, the early 1970’s Nifty-Fifty mania, the late-1990’s tech bubble, and the 2007 mortgage bubble that preceded the global financial crisis, none has so thoroughly nurtured the illusion that extended losses are impossible than the bubble we find ourselves in today.

Benjamin Graham understood that even when extreme valuations are not immediately corrected by market losses in the shorter-run, they are typically followed by disappointing investment returns and very long, interesting trips to nowhere. The fact is that most of the fluctuation in 10-12 year S&P 500 returns is driven not by changes in fundamental growth, but by changes in valuation multiples. When valuations are depressed, investors not only purchase expected future cash flows at an attractive price; they also avail themselves of the potential for valuations to increase in the future. At extreme valuations, investors not only purchase expected future cash flows at an elevated price; they also expose themselves to the potential for valuations to retreat in the future.

John Hussman: Pushing Extremes

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In calling the current market the third “Real McCoy” bubble of recent decades, Jeremy Grantham described, in his own words, what I call the Iron Law of Valuation: a security is nothing more than a claim on some set of future cash flows that investors expect to be delivered into their hands over time. The higher the price an investor pays today for some amount of cash in the future, the lower the long-term return the investor can expect on that investment.

However, there’s a difference between those long-term return prospects, which are driven by valuations and discounted cash flows, and short-term return prospects, which are driven by the psychology of investors – particularly their inclination toward speculation or risk-aversion. I talk about this in terms of market internals. Grantham describes it as a “psychological node.” We may navigate that aspect of the financial markets in different ways, but both of us recognize that the long-term prospects implied by valuations don’t condense into short-term implications for market direction.