[jandrewrogers]

P/E doesn't even tell you that. Companies with negative revenue growth rates often have low P/E ratios but these are often overvalued and poor investments even then. Sophisticated investors, and therefore market pricing, take all of this into account when valuing companies. All trivial nominal measures of stock value were completely arbitraged out of the market many years ago.

There are still measures that correlate well with low risk and strong returns for some subset of companies, but identifying a subset and building valuation models for them is non-trivial (e.g. I typically use risk models for revenue growth in comparative valuation which don't even apply to most of the market). If it was as simple as looking at a trivial ratio of public numbers, everyone would already be doing it.

I've been investing a long time and the markets have changed a lot over the decades. At this point, I think most of the investing advice from several decades ago is obsolete because it is based on assumptions that aren't actually true today. Investment advice and heuristics have a shelf-life. Most people aren't going to build a portfolio strategy from first principles, it is a lot of work, hence the popularity of index funds.

[criticaljudge]

I certainly didn't want to suggest that P/E is a reliable or sufficient indicator for good investments. It was just about this claim that everything is just gambling at this point.