The stockmarket melt-up just keeps going

Despite all the bad news, markets just keep hitting new highs. Should you be worried?

Ducklings
When the ducks are quacking, it’s time to feed them
(Image credit: © Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Levels of public debt not seen since World War II; a labour shortage; fast-rising inflation; more new Covid-19 variants; small businesses suffering from supply crunches; chaos in Afghanistan; rising mutterings about inequality; anti-wealth and anti-market policies in China; ridiculously high equity valuations in the US. It’s a lot for markets to cope with. You’d think they’d wobble some, but no. Instead, the melt-up just keeps going – and America’s S&P 500 index just keeps hitting record highs. Should you worry?

There are stories you can tell to make yourself feel a bit better (stockmarkets are nothing more than a sum of stories). You could perhaps argue that US earnings estimates are rising so fast that it makes everything look kind of OK. S&P 500 stocks as a whole beat analysts’ estimates nicely in both the first and second quarters – so everyone is now busy upgrading their forecasts for the year. The higher these go (S&P average forecast operating earnings per share are now at a record high) the less awful valuations look, and the easier it is to justify endlessly rising stockmarkets.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.