With 97.2% of the index having reported for the September 2017 Quarter, you are finally on pace, for the FIRST time since, to beat the September 30, 2014 cumulative 12 month earnings per share. If you stay on your current pace, the last completed twelve months will have beaten the 12 months ended September 30, 2014 by a WHOPPING 1.2%. Even though it took you three years to do it, the brilliant fund managers clearly saw this coming and bid up your index price by 31.95% over the same period. Of course, I am really glad that his actually happened........because......if I had postulated something like this happening without it actually happening.......well.....people might have thought I was just plain crazy. So congratulations SPX, after three full years, you finally showed a LITTLE improvement. L......O......L!
(And, on a side note, I'm sure I'll get the dander up of some of the technical wizards around here by mentioning the current 24.27 PE.......after all.....we don't talk about that stuff because it is irrelevant. I had a friend a few years ago that decided to sell his company. He and I ran identical businesses and traveled to trade shows together. I knew basically everything about his business and he knew everything about mine. He had a gentleman's agreement to sell his company to a wholly owned subsidiary of a very well-known DOW listed company (listed then and now). Since the subsidiary's numbers were not broken out separately from the parent and his was a private company, the deal basically functioned like a deal in the private sector. The deal was rather good at eight times earnings plus inventory. The board of the parent company nixed the deal because they thought it was too expensive at eight times earnings......and this was a board of a publicly traded, DOW listed company. My friend ended up selling his company in the private sector for four times earnings. And only two years later, the competitor that bought it........wished that it hadn't done the deal.......because they lost money on it. My point is simple. In the private sector, almost no one would be dumb enough to pay so much for a mature company that, under the rosiest of scenarios, it would take 25 years just to break even on the deal. Selah.)
