Equity Valuation
What the market pays for the next twelve months of expected profit, across the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, semiconductors and technology — recorded once a day, every day, and readable as either a multiple or the earnings yield behind it.
S&P 500
19.55×
5.11% Earnings yield
What investors pay today for each dollar of profit the S&P 500 is expected to earn over the next twelve months.
Nasdaq-100
21.51×
4.65% Earnings yield
The multiple on the mega-cap growth complex — the index where a handful of names carry most of the weight, and most of the expectations.
Semiconductors
20.58×
4.86% Earnings yield
The most cyclical multiple on this page — and the one where the P/E most often tells you the opposite of what it appears to.
Info Tech
21.02×
4.76% Earnings yield
The technology sector priced on its own, without the consumer and communications names that ride along inside the Nasdaq-100.
| Index | Forward P/E | Change | Earnings yield | 5y median | 5y percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500S&P 500 | 19.55× | −0.04 | 5.11% | 20.34× | 37% |
| Nasdaq-100Nasdaq-100 | 21.51× | −0.26 | 4.65% | 24.77× | 14% |
| SemiconductorsSemiconductors | 20.58× | −0.11 | 4.86% | 22.80× | 31% |
| Info TechInfo Tech | 21.02× | −0.05 | 4.76% | 26.26× | 10% |
Each index is priced as a whole rather than as an average of its members: every constituent contributes its own expected earnings and its own market value, and the index multiple is the ratio of the two, weighted the way the index itself weights them. Expected earnings blend the next two fiscal years in proportion to how much of the coming twelve months falls in each, so the number does not jump when a company rolls its fiscal year. Companies that report in a currency other than the dollar are converted before aggregation, not after.
Values through the launch date come from a terminal-data archive of daily closes; every value after it is computed on this site from consensus earnings estimates and the tracking ETF’s published weights. The two agree to within 1% on the overlap for the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and technology.
It divides the current price by the profit a company or index is expected to earn over a future period, rather than the profit it has already reported. A blended forward 12-month P/E uses the next twelve months specifically, drawing on both of the next two fiscal years in proportion.
Prices reflect what investors expect, not what already happened. A trailing multiple can look cheap at the top of an earnings cycle and expensive at the bottom, because the denominator is describing a period the market has already moved past.
Because the denominator moves too. In deeply cyclical sectors the multiple is lowest when earnings are at their peak — which is usually late in a cycle, not early. Semiconductors are the clearest case of this inversion.
It is the P/E turned upside down — expected earnings divided by price, expressed as a percentage. It stays meaningful when earnings approach zero, where the P/E ratio runs away to infinity, and it can be compared directly against a bond yield.
Once every day. Each reading is kept permanently, which is what turns a current number into a history.