The speculative component rose above 100 percent during the 2008 - 2009 bear market, when the
drop in valuation multiples made up the entire loss in share value, on average.
Aside from dividends paid, price appreciation breaks down into two sources: growth in FFO / AFFO and / or
expansion in the valuation multiple (price - to - FFO or price - to - AFFO ratio).
Rather than rely on past averages to forecast future returns, we use a building - block approach that adds current yield, likely long - term growth in income, and some mean
reversion in valuation multiples to create forward - looking returns.
One way to project future expected returns, and to analyze past returns, is to separate them into a component that comes from growth in fundamentals and the component that comes from the change
in the valuation multiple on those fundamentals.
The change
in the valuation multiple, proxied by Shiller's cyclically adjusted price - to - earnings ratio (CAPE), contributed 0.30 % to total returns over the last 130 years.
I found this projection interesting and set out to examine how realistic it is, given what we know at this point in time, by decomposing total stock returns to its components, namely dividend yield, inflation, real earnings growth and change
in the valuation multiple.
As the period of analysis lengthens, a larger contribution of a stock's return comes from a change in the fundamentals, compared with the contribution from a change
in valuation multiples.
But what really drives the change
in valuation multiples is the numerator; the price investors are willing to pay for a certain amount of earnings.