Thomson Reuters forward SPX P/E ratio dropped to 16.73. Remember, somehow this data is looking backward to price but we want to see trends over time.

This is most clearly illustrated here in Yardeni's "Blue Angels." In his SPX charts, you can see how forward valuation levels via P/E were support or resistance. A finer turned non graphic version is exactly what I am doing with these posts. Using Thomson data as he does, we have a similar valuation high at 17x forward earnings. The high was on 7/29 at 17.20.

For a very deep dive, see this more extensive PDF here.

For our purposes, 17x area - though the SPX value has moved from week to week as earnings estimates change (and I'm not sure source of these earnings estimates, as there does seem to be some backwards look to price) - has been resistance. Since I moved over to Thomson from WSJ in July, 17x forward earnings has been from 2135 low reached on 9/16 to 2216 high on 7/22. That is obviously quite wide and again, rough trend over time here is the point of these posts. The majority of readings were more clustered; even by tossing the 3 most extreme values over 15 weeks (1 low and 2 high as it turns out) reading we have a range of 2150-2121. For any actual high of 2193 that isn't too bad.

Citigroup Economic Surprise Index, also as reported by Yardeni, is negative. This has coincided with a range bound pullback. Note the time when it moved from negative to decently positive coincided with the index breakout up to new all time highs.