Some people are making the case that the stock market can rally meaningfully even without the financial sector recovering. I disagree simply because earnings are being negatively impacted so severely by loan losses and mark to market writedowns at the large financial institutions that investors won't get a clear picture of what a reasonable expectation for S&P 500 earnings are until financial sector earnings at least stabilize, if not climb back toward breakeven.
Jeremy Siegel, well known Wharton finance professor and author of "Stocks for the Long Run" (an excellent book) had an opinion-editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal recently that was titled "The S&P 500 Gets Its Earnings Wrong" (subscription only) that made some interesting points about the currently depressed level of earnings for the S&P 500.
Dr. Siegel explains that while the S&P 500 is market value weighted (larger companies are weighted more heavily in the index than the smaller ones), Standard and Poor's does not use the same methodology when calculated the index's earnings. Instead, a dollar of profit from the smallest stock is treated the same as a dollar earned by the largest. As a result, the losses being accumulated by a small portion of the index are negating the profits being generated by the majority, which is making the S&P 500's earnings look overly depressed.
Consider the data below, taken from Siegel's column:
Siegel is suggesting that the absolutely abysmal financial performance of the market's worst stocks last year (mostly from financial services firms, of course) is giving the appearance that corporate profits have absolutely fallen off a cliff in every area during this recession. He is quick to point out that 84% of the largest 500 public companies in the U.S. (420 out of 500) are actually doing quite well. That fact is going unnoticed because $1 of earnings from the smallest stock in the S&P is treated the same as $1 of earnings from the largest component, even though an investor in the S&P 500 owns 1,300 times more of the largest one than the smallest.
I'm not sure if Siegel is suggesting that they should actually go ahead and change the way they calculate S&P 500 earnings (and if so, I'm not sure I would even agree with him), but I do think this data is very helpful in seeing just how much the financial sector is masking corporate profits from other sectors.
My personal estimate right now for S&P 500 fair value is around 1,050 (14 to 15 times normalized earnings of between $70 and $80). I came up with those estimates before reading Siegel's article, but the data he provided give me comfort in the estimate. After all, if you assume the bottom 80 companies get back to breakeven and the other 420 companies maintain their 2008 profitability (both are conservative assumptions when the recession ends in my view), we see that S&P 500 earnings would range from $67 (if you use GAAP earnings) to $81 (if you use operating profits).
As you can see, any relief for the financial sector with respect to mark-to-market accounting principles could temper the writedowns going forward. Even getting the financial sector to breakeven by 2010 would reduce the negative earnings impact from the bottom 6% of the S&P 500, clearing the way for earnings to rebound pretty quickly from the $40-$50 level analysts are projecting for 2009.