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The Price of Risk: With Equity Risk Premiums, Caveat Emptor!

Musings on Markets

If you have been reading my posts, you know that I have an obsession with equity risk premiums, which I believe lie at the center of almost every substantive debate in markets and investing. That said, I don't blame you, if are confused not only about how I estimate this premium, but what it measures.

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Sovereign Ratings, Default Risk and Markets: The Moody's Downgrade Aftermath!

Musings on Markets

For more than a decade, S&P remained the outlier, but in 2023, Fitch joined it by also downgrading the US from AAA to AA+ , citing the same reasons. The second is that local currency defaults are persistent over time, and while less frequent than foreign currency defaults, remain a significant proportion of total defaults.

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Data Update 2 for 2023: A Rocky Year for Equities!

Musings on Markets

After a year of being pummeled by markets, what are investors pricing stocks to make in 2023 and beyond? The first is that the use of historical risk premiums is predicated on the belief that the future will look like the past, and the world, in all its dimensions, has changed dramatically over the last few decades.

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Data Update 4 for 2023: Country Risk - Measures and Implications

Musings on Markets

A few weeks ago, I posted my first data update pulling together what I had learned from looking at the data in 2023, and promised many more on the topic. Default Risk As with individuals and businesses, governments (sovereigns) borrow money and sometimes struggle to pay them back, leading to to the specter of sovereign default.

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Market Resilience or Investors In Denial? A Mid-year Assessment for 2023!

Musings on Markets

I am just not good at it, and the first six months of 2023 illustrate why market timing is often the impossible dream, something that every investor aspires to be successful at, but very few succeed on a consistent basis. Markets, as is their wont, live to surprise, and the first six months of 2023 has wrong-footed the experts (again).

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Data Update 3 for 2023: Inflation and Interest Rates

Musings on Markets

Just as rising equity risk premiums push up the cost of equity, rising default spreads push up the cost of debt of companies, with the added complication of higher default risk for those companies that had pushed to the limits of their borrowing capacity in a low interest-rate environment.

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Data Update 1 for 2025: The Draw (and Danger) of Data

Musings on Markets

Thus, as you peruse my historical data on implied equity risk premiums or PE ratios for the S&P 500 over time, you may be tempted to compute averages and use them in your investment strategies, or use my industry averages for debt ratios and pricing multiples as the target for every company in the peer group, but you should hold back.