[georgeecollins]

In the long run, I believe yes. PE also would not have been helpful in the late 1920s or late 1990s. But things tend to revert.

One of the reasons why different companies have different p/e for a long time is expectation of growth. So META has had a pretty high P/E, but then E has been growing really fast. GM's earnings don't grow so past so the P/E is low. And capital efficiency also hurts P/E.

Disclaimer: I believe stocks represent fractional ownership of an actual company and are ultimately (but not always) valued as such. You can make an argument that financial instruments are just driven by sentiment, supply and demand, and have no correlation to actual reality.