Just a reminder that a larger portion of today's market value is made up from Tech stocks. Tech stocks are typically higher valuations and P/E multiples, giving a skewed data point perspective vs. 20 years ago.
I see Cisco with a few years of 15% net income profit margin from 1998 to 2000 (they do not have any reports before that on their website). And Ericcson is in the single digit ranges around 7%. Cisco actually got more profitable and since at least 2006 has been in the 20% range.
Apple has been in 20%+ range for over a decade, Alphabet in the 25% range, Microsoft is hitting 30% regularly, and Facebook is at nearly 40% for the last 5 years.
For Amazon, I can only assume investors are factoring in huge profit margins for AWS since it seems to be singlehandedly marching Amazon’s profit margins from near 0% to 6% in the last 6 or 7 years.
Feels like a different level of profit than in previous decades.
So you are arguing that the market is overvalued -- because tech stocks are overvalued? Makes sense, perhaps the apparent overvalue is simply because of companies like Uber and Tesla.
At the end of the day, stocks are worth whatever people pay for them. It is a fact that tech stocks do have higher P/E multiples at this moment in time. The important question for investors is whether those multiples mean that the stocks are overvalued... or whether they deserve it. The market will decide that, and the answer may change drastically just like any other set of stocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nifty_Fifty
The members of that group were the tech giants of their time.
Replace "large-cap" with "tech" in that article. Rinse and repeat.