S&P 500: 1990s Bull Market Analogs Suggest Room to Run Despite High Valuations

Published 06/10/2025, 07:45
Updated 06/10/2025, 07:46

This week: monthly charts, analogs, valuations, bulls, and breakouts.

Learnings and conclusions from this week’s charts:

  • The S&P 500 made its 5th monthly gain in a row in September.

  • 1990s analogs say there may yet be room to run for this bull market.

  • However, ever-loftier valuations suggest tempering enthusiasm.

  • The “S&P493” is overvalued vs global peers (which are breaking out).

  • There’s a growing list of big bullish breakouts globally.

Overall, the bull market bulls on — and while there are various warning signs starting to light up, there are also numerous bullish developments popping up globally, pointing to bullish broadening and highlighting the merits of looking further afield and beyond the obvious, most popular parts of the market.

1. Happy New Month!

Another month, another gain, and still a picture of strength here (clean and clear uptrend, price above 10-month average). The S&P 500 notched up +3.53% on the month in September — its 5th monthly gain in a row.S&P 500 Chart

Source: Topdown Charts

2. Monthly Gains

Curiously, there has only been 5 times since 2009 that the S&P 500 has had monthly win-streaks of greater than 5 months in a row (vs 6 times when the win-streak ended at 5 months in a row) pretty close to 50/50 odds of up (45%) vs down in October on that alone (but worse odds than when you get to 4 in-a-row [65% chance of next month up]). And then there’s also the point that seasonality tends to be a bit rough and tumble in October, so we’ll see.S&P 500 Monthly Gains Tracker

Source: Topdown Charts

3. Bull Market 1990s Analogs

On the bullish side, many have been highlighting the 1990s bull market analogs, and there sure does seem to be some similarities on first glance, but also many differences (good and bad) in terms of macro, value, rates, earnings, tech cycles, etc. Certainly something to think about in terms of what could be possible.

Bull Market Analog-1994-2000

Source: @TimmerFidelity

4. Lofty Heights

One point against that is the combined PE ratio (average of trailing 12m PE, forward 12m PE, and PE10 — intended to try accentuate signal vs noise and overcome the shortcomings vs strengths of each of those 3 methods) has reached its third-highest point in recent history outside of the dot-com bubble and 2021 stimmy bubble. Not ga ood company.S&P 500 Valuations

Source: Topdown Charts Professional— see also on this topic: Chart of the Week - Drift Risk Rising

5. Developed ex-US vs US ex-Mag7

On the topic of valuations, things do look a bit more reasonable when you exclude Mag7, but the “S&P493” is not exactly cheap, and in fact there is better value if you look at global ex-US and p.s. the whole “superior earnings” argument for US also goes out the window when you look at it this way as SP493 EPS look actually similar to DM ex-US.Trailing EPS vs 2-Year Fwd PE Ratio

Source: Bridgewater via Daily Chartbook

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