Life sure was easier in the old days when we didn’t HAVE weather.
With an abundant flow of cheap money made available to businesses courtesy of a money-printing Fed through endless QE, a lot of companies have been buying back their own shares. This, of course, helps to improve their EPS (as earnings are divided by an ever decreasing number of shares).
If you remove the beneficial accounting effects of these share buybacks from the reported Q1 EPS for the S&P 500 the overall EPS figure would be even lower.
Excellent piece but theres one over riding consideration that seems to always be over looked in these sort of articles. Inflows. Every month, every day, funds are going into markets. Its inescapable. Between IRA’s and pensions both in the public and private sector the game is simply rigged that way. Any fund manager,and individual making these choices has the option of bonds or stocks. Bond yields,not returns over the past few years but yields, are at levels where they can never bring about the returns needed to fund a retirement. This is about math.