Market valuation
From Shiller's record and SPY's prices. Not supplied or endorsed by S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Is the market expensive? The clearest gauge is CAPE — price divided by a decade of inflation-adjusted earnings, so a single good or bad year can't distort it. Here it is for the S&P 500 back to 1871, with what each valuation level has historically meant for the next ten years. Pick the earnings window below.
CAPE averages inflation-adjusted earnings over the window to smooth the business cycle. 10 years = Robert Shiller's classic CAPE; shorter windows track a normal P/E, longer ones smooth more.
As of Nov 2026, the S&P 500's 10-year CAPE was 38.3 — the 98th percentile since 1880. When valuations were near this level, the next 10 years returned a median +0.5%/yr real (p10 -3.5%, p90 +5.4%) — 95 comparable months.
Valuation through history. The dashed line is the long-run average; the readout follows your pointer. Peaks mark euphoria (1929, 2000, 2021), troughs mark despair (1932, 1982, 2009).
Each dot is one month: its CAPE (x) vs the real return that followed over the chosen horizon (y). The blue line is the average by valuation level — historically the strongest cheap-vs-expensive signal there is. The dashed line is today.
The other side of valuation: what the index pays out. Yields were 4–6% for most of the 20th century and have compressed as prices rose and buybacks replaced dividends.
How these numbers are put together — and where ours differs from the canonical figure.
CAPE = the S&P 500's real (inflation-adjusted) price ÷ its average real earnings over the chosen window. A 10-year window is Robert Shiller's classic CAPE; we let you pick others. Forward returns are real total returns (dividends reinvested).
Data. Price, earnings, dividends and CPI back to 1871 come from Robert Shiller's public dataset, which carries as-reported index earnings to its last closed quarter; from there earnings are held against each later month's close, as a trailing multiple is, and CPI continues on the Federal Reserve's series (FRED), chained to Shiller's at the overlap so the line never jumps.
Caveat. This is our reconstruction — close to, but not identical to, the official Shiller CAPE (our aggregate earnings differ slightly in method and timing from the index's as-reported figure). Treat it as directionally accurate, not the canonical decimal. Latest complete window: Nov 2026 (bounded by company filing lag).
The scatter's readout. 1632 dots is too many to give each its own styled tooltip, so every dot carries a native title instead — hover and hold for its month, CAPE and outcome.
Valuation is a long-horizon signal with wide error bars — useless for timing, informative for expectations. For informational purposes only; not investment advice.
FAQ#
- What is the CAPE ratio?
- CAPE (cyclically-adjusted price-to-earnings), also called the Shiller P/E or PE10, divides the S&P 500's price by the average of its inflation-adjusted earnings over the past 10 years. Averaging a decade of earnings smooths out the business cycle so booms and busts don't distort the ratio.
- Does a high CAPE mean a crash is coming?
- No. CAPE has essentially no power to predict short-term moves or time the market — expensive markets can stay expensive for years. What it has historically tracked is the next 10–15 years of real returns: higher starting valuations have, on average, been followed by lower long-run returns, with wide error bars.
- Why let me change the earnings window?
- Shiller's CAPE uses a 10-year earnings average. A 1-year window is essentially a normal trailing P/E; longer windows (15–20 years) smooth even more. Comparing windows shows how much the smoothing choice matters to the picture.
Sources
- Robert Shiller's public record: Monthly prices, dividends and earnings of the S&P 500 since 1871, as compiled and published by Robert Shiller.
- SPY's prices and dividends: The fund's market prices and dividends, licensed from Twelve Data.
ChartRow is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC, S&P Global, Nasdaq, Inc., FTSE Russell, MSCI Inc., Robert Shiller, RSBB-I, LLC, or Yale University. "S&P 500®" and "S&P®" are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and "Dow Jones®" of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC, both licensed to S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC; "Nasdaq-100®" is a registered trademark of Nasdaq, Inc.; "CAPE®" is a registered trademark of RSBB-I, LLC; all other index names are trademarks of their owners. They are used here only to identify those indexes and the funds that seek to track them. ChartRow receives no data from, and holds no licence from, any index provider: the holdings and weights shown start from the tracking fund's own holdings as reported in its public SEC filings, updated where noted for publicly announced index changes since the latest filing and rolled forward by ChartRow from daily prices, with any name added since the filing estimated from market cap; returns are the fund's own market prices; long-run S&P 500 history comes from public research datasets, Robert Shiller's and Aswath Damodaran's, credited where used. These figures are ChartRow's own estimates and computations from public filings, prices and research records, provided for information only and without warranty of accuracy; they are not the fund's or any index provider's official figures and may differ from them.
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