Sorry, but that is absolute nonsense. You dont seem to be familiar with the Fama and French research. They got literally a nobel prize for it.
CAPE ratio is an extremely strong, empirically validated predictor of future expected return.
Do good products even exist for that?
I imagine the returns, especially for US, are eaten up by very high trading costs.
No, they did not. Fama received his Nobel prize for his efficient market hypothesis, not for his factor research. French never received a Nobel prize. You are misinformed
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Interesting thought process, I have had similar thoughts many times, however how do you account for literally all big US asset managers recommending 30-40% ex-US? Wouldnât this have an impact?
Weâre a minority here (and in the US) who take a very keen interest in âthe whole investing thingâ, enough to read and write about it in public fora.
In the US in 2022 the headlines were that nearly 50% of households have no retirement account whatsoever. Sure, with wealth inequality of the US this may mean they represent people who have no retirement accounts because they live breadcrumb to breadcrumb so they wouldnât move the needle anyway. I donât know. I have also had the opposite thought and wondered if European valuations would be even lower if it wasnât for European pension funds taking small, but not insignificant positions in home equity.
It makes more sense to me logically that Joe Schmoe from 'bama walks into their local Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab/Edward Jones office and asks to plan for his pension, gets put in a Target Date Fund with automatic contributions and rides happily into the sunset.
I know that French did not receive one but Fama did for his three FACTOR model:
Wikipedia:
âIn 2013, Fama shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirical analysis of asset prices. The three factors are (1) market excess return, (2) the outperformance of small versus big companies, and (3) the outperformance of high book/market versus low book/market companies.â
Ken French btw works for Dimensional.
There is surely a correlation between high P/E (or Price /book) and lower prospective returns when applied at total market level
On the other hand if an individual stock has a high P/E or Price / book it doesnât mean it is overvalued. âA great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great priceâ. (Munger)
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Oh yes.
EUSA is my preferable one.
RSP, GSEW, and others, including equal weighted sectors, equal weighted stocks within the sectors, and both at 2 levels of equal weighting.
There are thousands of US ETFs on US stocks market, and often I have an impression that they have tried all conceivable ways to reshuffle them into a portfolio.
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But do they have a premium left after accounting for trading costs (due to be equal weighted and to keep it that way, the fund has to trade a lot internally), is the big question probably. Iâll look into those a bit more.
Wrong. The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2013 was awarded jointly to Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert J. Shiller âfor their empirical analysis of asset pricesâ. Beginning in the 1960s, Eugene Fama and several collaborators demonstrated that stock prices are extremely difficult to predict in the short run, and that new information is very quickly incorporated into prices. These findings not only had a profound impact on subsequent research but also changed market practice. The emergence of so-called index funds in stock markets all over the world is a prominent example.
Read the paper, no mention of factors, much less the value factor.
His work on factors with French is more recent and controversial.
I even overweight the US by aiming for a 70% allocation. I think their stock market is superior to all the others 
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Not that it matters much, but I do see the Fama-French three-factor model in the Scientific Background document referenced on the press release page: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2013/10/advanced-economicsciences2013.pdf
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True, but they note that this model has been challenged by other researchers. So it has not been the reason for which Fama has received the Nobel prize.
If it was for the three-factor model, Ken French should have received the Nobel prize too, which he didnât.
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Feel free to correct the wikipedia entry 
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Enjoy the ride, its never a mistake to put your money on a trend. But beware - it is just a trend. See my post above. Some day it may reverse, and if that happens - things will go VERY fast. So would recommend to watch trends and as things go down, fast convert back to all world.
Every weight below Market Cap weight increases the problem. 100 Investors that invest with 30% ex-Us only equate to approx 50 investors that invest with Market Cap weight and 50 investors that invest with US only.
Clearly, home-country bias is all over the place and the US is not the only one with a heavy one. There is an interesting Vanguard Paper on this. But given that the US had a massive increase on investable money for smaller investors plus the recent trend; things have gone out of control. Just think about the american âpensionâ system where everyone selects index funds to their liking. These days, even European Investors or Swiss Investors like Cortana over-weight the US.
What is recent US Overperformance was simply a distortion that allocates too much to the US? What if the nice trend of US savers beeing able to invest the largest amount into shares (in absolute terms). What if that changes and trend followers spot the reversal? OuchâŠ
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Dunno, weâll see. Personally I am not convinced the next big thing can come from outside of the US. It may not be an American that does it, it may be an Indian, Romanian, Chinese, Nigerian, or Fiji Islander, but I am certain that it will happen in the USA than in India, Romania, China, Nigeria, or Fiji.
Whenever someone, anywhere in the world, thinks up something really smart they either go to the US to realise it, or sell it to a US company. A lot of social mobility too in the US, all tied to money, and softer cultural barriers, universal language. Wonder how easy it is for a foreigner or a woman to make it in Japan or Korea, LGBT people making it⊠anywhere other than âthe Westâ.
/sarcasm Plus all that backed by positive population growth, cornfields the size of Europe, raw materials, and about 10 aircraft carriers filled with gun-totting cowboys and nuclear strategic bombers. 'murica f4ck yea 
/sarcasm
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There might be more boom-bust in the US but nevertheless quality companies happen to be over-proportionately listed there: companies with growing revenues, solid balance sheets, and high returns on capital. I donât think it is by chance.
I would add to the list strong governance and low government interference; can-do attitude and spirit of innovation
âNever bet against Americaâ
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This.
People in 2013 were predicting a market crash based on valuations. A CAPE value of 25 back then was considered by some as dangerously high for the S&P500: Be Prepared for Stocks to Crash
CAPE for the S&P500 in late 1996 was also at 25, a level until then only ever reached in 1928-1929. It was dangerously high. Yet, despite the dotcom and subprime loans crashes, with dividends reinvested, the S&P500 never went lower again than where it was back then: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-allocation?s=y&sl=7J1fCZP8ciweJDThzSfLV
In order to time overvaluations efficiently, one has to:
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leave the market not too early (while there are already plenty of articles around calling stocks overvalued and due for a crash) and not too late.
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for the market to experience a crash rather than it going sideways for quite some time.
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to be confident enough to re-enter the market early enough once things get calmer, and not too early because fake bottoms do happen.
I do think US stocks are overvalued and am willing to do something about it (though to be fair, my marbles are all off the table right now due to buying a house and planning renovations) but Iâm pretty confident that if doing so can lessen the bluntness of a potential crash, it is not likely to lead to better returns.
Edit: maybe worth mentioning: not timing valuations (that is, riding the market through its highs and lows at market valuations), means being invested and fully taking the blow when (not if) market crashes happen. It takes a calm and clear mind as well as fortitude to do so. Reducing stock exposure is a way to help with that if the idea of watching stocks loosing 80% of their value (which can happen) without panic selling and while still sleeping decently enough at night seems difficult (as it probably is).
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Iâd add that shareholder value is king, shareholders drive companies, who buy and sell politicians, who implement policy for their benefit. Many people living paycheck to paycheck, up to their eyeballs in debt, one missclick away from ruin. Not a system Iâd love to live in, but will happily participate from civilised Europe.
Yeah, the issue is waiting for 6 years to come back from under water from Aug 2000 to Sep 2006, I wasnât there but imagine the fortitude required not to say âfuck itâ is immense, no matter what the data tell us. Thereâs a 50% drop between Aug 2000 to Sep 2003, and then another 50% drop from Oct 2007 to Feb 2009. As you know - Iâve played with the same data - thereâs negative return from 2000-2009. Of course if you add a market cap weighted international (say ex-US developed) to the mix the blow softens quite a bit, and thereâs a little bit of upside too.
Thatâs a very long time for a normal human to have a sizeable amount of money locked up not only doing nothing (but continuing incurring fees) but also to come out with a bit less than going in.
I know I tell myself âYeah great, buying at a discountâ, but 9 years is a long time. I am barely married for 10 years, but what 10 years theyâve been. Changed 2 jobs, moved countries, had 2 kids⊠The point I am trying to make is that this is a LONG time. Perhaps going forward there are fewer big life-changing events like these left, but who knows.
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Agree (on the amounts dumped in before âthe crashâ),
but we usually donât âbuy once and never againâ, at least in the accumulation phase.
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