@KingCoin,
I can generally agree with this statement: "They don't look screamingly cheap at the moment, but they're not trading much outside historical norms." But investors also need to recognize the change in the mix of what is driving earnings growth (it's not revenue growth to the extent it historically was) and the fact that easy monetary policy has helped to prop up the multiple assigned to the pathetically slow earnings growth of the past couple of years.
Over the past two years, S&P 500 earnings have grown a total of just 7.90% (remember that's two years of total earnings growth, not one). If investors were offered the opportunity to purchase a stock growing earnings in the low-to-mid single digits and trading at a P/E in the mid-teens, a lot of people would say no. But when the broader market does that, people say yes. And the reason they say yes all has to do with extremely rosy forward estimates making stocks continually look cheap. Of course, stocks are only cheap in the present based on forward estimates if those forward estimates can be realized. Forward analyst estimates for the S&P 500, however, have consistently been wrong for two straight years. Yet people continue to cite forward estimates as the reason that stocks don't appear expensive. And the reason people are willing to ignore what I think historically would not have been ignored all has to do with the Fed effectively forcing people who are searching for income into riskier assets. If you don't think the Fed's easy money policy will last forever . . . well, just work backwards through this post and the future effects of Fed tightening will become clear.
Just something to keep in mind.