“My attitude is, the market is likely to continue to do better, though I can’t point to historic metrics to prove my case the way I usually
can,” said Laszlo Birinyi, president of Birinyi Associates, a stock market research and money management firm in Westport, Conn.
Mr. Birinyi is a veteran strategist and a longtime bull.
The raw numbers for the stock market are astonishing: Even without counting dividends, the Standard & Poor’s index has risen more than 6 percent since New Year’s Day, nearly 20 percent in the last 12 months
and roughly 250 percent since the start of the bull market in March 2009.
In a telephone conversation, he said that while some of the market’s recent action has been very strong — “a huge move” upward on Wednesday after President Trump’s speech
to Congress, for example — the stock market’s path since 2009 has generally “been a series of slow, grinding moves” with little evidence of irrational exuberance.
For example, one widely followed metric, the price-to-earnings ratio of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — which
tells you how much money is being paid, on average, for $1 of corporate earnings — has become much less favorable.
If you don’t need the money for a long while and are able to retain your equanimity in a protracted
crisis, you may be able to avoid paying attention to the stock and bond markets.
In addition, even if you don’t need to use the money, selling securities that have incurred losses may be a good move, Mr. Birinyi said.
