Yeah, when you've got a published NAV that differs by 40-50% from a share price, you'd have to explain how they'd both be right.

I don't know if SF100 was trying to word that as a question, but there'd be a lot of chimpanzee references if he wasn't.

And Western nations in particular need to inflate away their debt so I wouldn’t be selling too many equities currently, and a global tracker is as good as anything at capturing that imho.

The MSCI World Index is in essence a bell weather for events in the USA with around a 73% weighting. Next is Japan with 5% weighting. That only leaves some 22% for the remaining 21 developed countries in the index.

Not sure there is anything else that forecasts “greed a fear” so well. Not sure anyone can beat the system so why bother.

The important thing is where equity earnings yields are in relation to bond yields. So when bond yields are low, stock PE ratios can justify being very high – because the basic equation markets are doing is: what can I get without taking risk, vs what can I get with risk?

The tech boom gave the public a very simple story: PE ratios too high. But equally important was that bond yields hit 6%. If they'd been 1%, stocks would've still been the only game in town.

I feel we wasted a lot of the 2010s talking about CAPE ratios – only for stocks to keep climbing. And that's why Shiller turned CAPE into ECV (Excess CAPE Yield). But this was academia and the media playing catchup to a very simple assessment markets are doing all the time. I think with the 10yr at 4.5%, stocks should be around PE 22.5. Some optimism on AI's immediate effects on margins and investment, and I don't think it's obvious markets are overpriced. I'd still be trying to buy what's out of favour, because future returns certainly could be on the lower side – every year stocks go up 22%, but economies don't grow that fast, is going to exert some kind of pull.