“It’s more important how high the valuation is than how long it took to get there,” Russ Koesterich, the chief investment strategist at New York-based BlackRock Inc., said by phone on Aug. 22. BlackRock is the world’s largest money manager, with $3.8 trillion in assets. “Valuations today are below where they were in 2007 and much, much below their levels in 2000.”
The S&P 500 traded at 17.5 times earnings when the index hit a high of 1,565.15 on Oct. 9, 2007, Bloomberg data show. The valuation reached 31 times income in March 2000 as it peaked at 1,527.46.