Meb Faber’s twitter feed is a great source to find new research ideas — his followers are very curious.
Today, someone asked about the P/E of mega-cap firms relative to the broader market.
Yang fired up his Bloomberg, conducted some quick excel ninja tactics, and generated the following chart:
Takeaways:
- The S&P 500 value-weighted P/E is 16.97
- The average P/E of the top 100 names by market cap is 46.16 (skewed by some extreme valuations on firms like Amazon)
- The plot highlights that aside from extreme valuations on a handful of firms, mega-cap valuations aren’t that different than the S&P 500 (which makes sense because they make up the vast majority of the S&P 500’s market cap).
About the Author: Wesley Gray, PhD
After serving as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps, Dr. Gray earned an MBA and a PhD in finance from the University of Chicago where he studied under Nobel Prize Winner Eugene Fama. Next, Wes took an academic job in his wife’s hometown of Philadelphia and worked as a finance professor at Drexel University. Dr. Gray’s interest in bridging the research gap between academia and industry led him to found Alpha Architect, an asset management firm dedicated to an impact mission of empowering investors through education. He is a contributor to multiple industry publications and regularly speaks to professional investor groups across the country. Wes has published multiple academic papers and four books, including Embedded (Naval Institute Press, 2009), Quantitative Value (Wiley, 2012), DIY Financial Advisor (Wiley, 2015), and Quantitative Momentum (Wiley, 2016).
Dr. Gray currently resides in Palmas Del Mar Puerto Rico with his wife and three children. He recently finished the Leadville 100 ultramarathon race and promises to make better life decisions in the future.