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Shiller CAPE ratio

Valuation/CAPE · series from 1871 · S&P 500 · 3 sources · data as of 30 Jul 2026

Price against earnings is a simple idea. What you pay, measured against what the business earns. The trouble is that earnings swing hard with the economy, so an ordinary P/E goes haywire exactly when you want it to be steady. In a recession profits fall faster than share prices, and the ratio shoots up right when stocks are cheapest. CAPE is the fix. It compares today's price against the average of the last ten years of earnings, with inflation stripped out of both sides.

This page has the current reading, what the measure has averaged across more than 150 years of data, every notable high and low from the 1920 bottom to the 1999 top, and the other valuation measures worth reading alongside it. I put it together because CAPE is one of the most quoted numbers in finance and one of the most misused. It describes how expensive the market is quite well. It tells you close to nothing about when anything will happen, and the gap between those two things has cost people a great deal of money.

There's a chart further down showing the same market looking either wildly expensive or roughly normal depending on which ratio you pick. Both calculations are correct. That's the part worth sitting with. The sources are listed at the end with the dates I read them, so you can pull the numbers up and check I haven't fudged anything.