Here are a few nuggets from my WSJ on 7/31 by Mark Gongloff.
"The yield on the 10-year Treasury has dropped below 3% as investors scramble for safe havens, and the demand for corporate rate bonds is booming. At the end of trading Friday, the earnings yield on the SPX index was 6.6%, based on the past four quarters' operating earnings, the highest since 1995. The gap between that yield and the 10-year Treasury yield - a measure of the cheapness of stocks relative to Treasury bonds - is the widest in about 30 years. People are so risk-averse now that a tremendous potential opportunity is being created in stocks.
In the eyes of stock-market bulls, the underperformance this time around has left corporate bonds expensive and stocks attractively cheap, pricing in dire economic outcomes that most forecasters still don't think likely. You would have to believe in at least a mild recession to prefer corporate bonds over equities at this stage. I would argue that the asset class with the most upside, even in a scenario of slow growth, is equities.
The recent outperformance of bonds is also a reflection of the fact that individual investors have largely turned their backs on stocks after two crushing bear markets and a decade of negative returns.
Despite last year's stock-market rally, one of the best on record, individual investors pulled money from stock mutual funds and poured them into bond funds. The trend has continued this year, with long-term stock funds suffering a net $1.1 billion in outflows and bond funds enjoying $177.6 billion in inflows." The question is: can 50 million Frenchman be wrong. You bet!! Bull markets do not like company, the market will do everything it can to make the majority gun shy and keep the bears from recognizing the prevailing trend. As a bull I couldn't be more pleased with the bond market over valuation. The world will shake when that money starts to move back to equities. Snort.