Can anyone who has read the article and at least agrees with it somewhat, explain what on earth is this "standard measure of fair value"? And then this so called "adjusted" measure, how it is calculated? Do people actually believe this shit?

I mean this adjusted fair value seems like a cop-out, either it is fair value or it is not, don't adjust for things just because you do not want to look stupid!!! Yeah tech companies has changed quality of earnings, but so what? What kind of analysis is this?

Honestly I do not see why people think these sorts of 0-value added articles should not be criticised, the problem is naive people will read it as gospel and act on it. it scares people off investing without proper thought.

Learn about asset allocation, your risk tolerance, your need to take risk and all that good stuff. But lets not pretend these articles are in any way useful to judge value - they are not.

IMO no one has the ability to tell you what fair value is and also no one I knows has the ability to work out asset allocation/risk tolerance to add value. Remember also you will tend to be behind the curve and therefore tend to underperform..

The marketing departments and FMs etc. will be happy to provide all with there guesses as to the next day to say 10/20 years times. Remember the past is no indication of the future and shares can go down as well as up.

Not sure how you can measure YOUR risk tolerance with out being part of the herd which leads you into fear and greed mode.

I would note we've just had a phase (2022), where valuations mattered – in bonds. I'm skeptical of people who claim to have sold out of bonds just before the crash – only because, if you were looking at yields, you'd have sold out in 2014/15 ... And it didn't matter being 8 years too early, because you'd have done well in almost anything (with rates that low – everything rises).

The problem with doing this with stocks is they have this growth dimension (bonds – very simple – they'd either crash, or just spend 10-20 years yielding nothing). And markets are basically pricing in growth non-stop.

I'd say 95% of the time, markets get this right. The reason Europe's cheaper than US is because Europe's growth is stagnant. In fact, the US should've been more expensive – even going back 10-15 years, when we were all told the US was too expensive ... No, it just had a brighter outlook. Right now, US futures are rising on another round of companies beating estimates ... Conclusion: I'd keep an eye on what you can value (bonds and Investment Trusts). I wouldn't go allocating to 'cheap' regions. I wouldn't get hung up on US vs ex-US – most of these businesses are global, and the US just has better businesses.

Imagine a global fund that automatically adjusted it's regional stock allocation every time it detected a new article published for retail investors stating that such and such a market was "overvalued". I'm willing to bet my entire portfolio it would underperform a simple global tracker.

Personally I sold out of bonds before the crash. I made comments to this effect in the transactions thread and the reasoning behind it. It wasn't based on yields at the time it was based on forecasts of inflation and rate rises. Which were the canary in the mine for anyone willing to listen.

I didn't have bonds in 2014/15, as I was still in accumulation and 100% equities.

What is there to be skeptical about?