your question was " does anyone pay you 12 times the earnings you generate"
well why should they , the person who pays for your labour/time is not buying you . When you buy a share you are buying a piece of that company and you will in the normal course of events get your share of the co's earnings /dividends.
As for p/e ratios, if you take 100k and invest it in a 30 yearT-Bond that pays 5% you are effectively buying an instrument with a p/e ratio of 20............price is 100k,earnings 5k.
There is obviously a major difference between the above example and shares because with a T-Bond your capital and return is guaranteed, not so with shares.
Going back to the T-Bond, if that is our benchmark i.e. 5% per annum or 20 times earnings then what should we expect from shares ? If you've read William O'Neill's books on investing you will probably have noticed that in his studies he found that a high p/e was no barrier to a share price increasing..........in fact a high p/e was a common feature of great growth stocks.
The point is simply that a high p/e is not a bad thing and should not stop anyone from investing in a stock
When your friend prechter shouts about p/e ratios he is talking about the average for the whole market. I read somewhere that he is predicting p/e's of 4 times............at that price you would be seeing a return of 25% on your investment and if this situation comes about then interest rates will be 0% and T-Bond wiil be yielding a lot less than 5%, it is the kind of prediction that makes headlines but is really nonsensical. USA inc. grinding to a halt?.......... forget about it, it aint gonna happen.
I recently read an interview with Warren Buffet, the reporter asked him about the bear market and the economy,he said that there are times when it pays to bet against the market but that it was stupid to bet against the American economy. If I had to put my money on Prechter or Buffet who would I go for the guy who makes money or the guy who makes predictions?
I started this post to answer your simple question, apologies for all the waffle