I'm brand-new to investing (well, mostly - I've held a small amount in low-rise mutual fund RRSPs purchased from the bank that I never bothered to learn anything about).
I'm investing $45k. Planning on following the Canadian Couch Potato model portfolio (somewhere between 'balanced' and 'assertive'), I got set up with TD Direct so that I could buy the e-series index funds.
I'm not trying to time the market here, but I do still think it's worth considering whether or not things are currently overvalued when sinking in a sizeable (for me, anyway) chunk of cash. I'm less concerned about regular contributions, because I recognize that the most important thing is that there
are regular contributions.
So... after looking at the MMM post '
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/06/09/how-to-tell-when-the-stock-market-is-on-sale/, I started wondering if it is a good or bad time, but realize I don't understand the PE ratio properly
I've already sunk some of the cash into the TD Canadian Bond Index, but I'm wondering about the others, which have PE ratios* as follows:
TD Canadian Index-e : 17.30
TD US Index-e: 20.27
TD International Index-e: 16.93
* I'm using the Weighted Average PE Ratio pulled from ycharts
All of these (in particular the US Index) are higher than the stated magic PE ratio of 16.4. But the MMM blog is referring to the SP500 Index, arrived at by calculating the weighted average of the P/E ratios of all the 500 companies in the S&P500 index (and the post is from 2011).
So how do I figure this out for these other indices? Should I be calculating it manually? ycharts also provides a "Forecasted PE Ratio". What's this? Am I overthinking this?
As you see, many questions! Your knowledge is appreciated.