My thoughts on equity using Bill Gross's GDP extrapolation and my required rate of return.
If Bill Gross's assessment that the GDP growth tends to revert to the mean of about 5% and I want to get at least 8% return on mature cyclical stocks the fair value of the Dow is, using the dividend discount model:
247.96 * 1.05 / (8% - 5%) = 8678.6
And the fair value of the S&P 500 using the same model:
819
Yikes!
Now, I'm not saying that the market needs to go to such levels in any way, but the model is just telling me, if I want 8% annualized return over the period of say, the next 10 years as a buy and hold investor, buying these indices at those levels will make sense. Right now the required rate of return for the big funds seems to be in the 7% range, far lower than the past 20 years (with the exception of the late 90s).