I am starting to see the same issues in Thomson Reuters that was in the WSJ data and honestly don't know what to make of it. Was Wall Street slashing forward guidance last week? If so that didn't make the headlines did it? The forward earnings estimates lows have been mid September and just last week - how convenient. My point is that ideally we are seeing valuation change as price chops around and estimates don't move as much in the short term; but instead we are seeing valuation levels react to price which doesn't help us as much.

I think there must be some curve fitting to someone's idea of an established model, because those Wall Street types want to feel like they are masters of the universe. Still I will keep an eye on this, because clearly with election and FOMC ahead some very big players decided to sell near 17x forward earnings and didn't want to push higher to 18x.

Current P/E dropped just .05 from 16.64 to 16.59 last week, which is bearish considering the price drop. Forward earnings back on the low end of the range since I shifted to Thomson Reuters data. Yardeni has a very detailed report here, and by his chart (also using Thomson btw) it looks more like move towards 16x area forward earnings - but his chart says data is 1 week behind so maybe he has figured out that is the way to reduce the price chopping effect. Using my Thomson numbers from 10/27, 16x forward earnings implies 2044.

I would say this chart of the Citigroup Economic Surprise Index has done a great job. While entirely in negative territory from the start of 2015 USA markets went nowhere and had two decent corrections (August 2015 and January 2016). When the index broke out into positive territory indexes followed - yes, this index led indexes on the rally. Then it promptly fell back into negative territory - again leading a significant drop.