Valuation Terminal View
Equity Valuation
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.
Core print
Current reading
Semiconductors is at 20.04×, in the lower half of its own five-year range (27th percentile). That is 12.1% below its five-year median of 22.79×. Over the past twelve months the multiple has compressed by 8.02 points. A multiple is only readable next to what moved it: check whether estimates are rising or falling before calling this expansion or growth.
Interactive chart
Semiconductors are the exception: the archive tracks the PHLX SOX index and the live series tracks the SOXX basket, so the two differ by about 2.8% by construction. That is a difference in what is being measured, not an error, and it does not shrink with a better method — read the percentile as approximate here.
Semiconductors trades at a blended forward 12-month P/E of 20.04× as of October 6, 2026, an earnings yield of 4.99%. Change from the previous session: −0.17. That is the 27th percentile of the trailing five years. Against every observation since 2002 it is the 56th percentile, across 6,222 daily readings. Recorded once a day and kept permanently — consensus estimates carry no vintages, so this history cannot be rebuilt after the fact.
Semiconductor earnings swing violently, and the multiple inverts as a result: it peaks at the bottom of the cycle, when earnings have collapsed toward zero, and troughs at the top, when earnings are running hot. A low semiconductor P/E has historically meant late-cycle, not cheap. This is also the series where the ratio can become undefined outright — in early 2009 aggregate expected earnings crossed zero, and no P/E exists on the other side of that. It is the reason this chart can be switched to the earnings yield, which stays finite where the ratio does not.
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.