“My attitude is, the market is likely to continue to do better, though I can’t point to historic metrics to prove my case the way I usually<br />can,” said Laszlo Birinyi, president of Birinyi Associates, a stock market research and money management firm in Westport, Conn.<br />Mr. Birinyi is a veteran strategist and a longtime bull.<br />The raw numbers for the stock market are astonishing: Even without counting dividends, the Standard & Poor’s index has risen more than 6 percent since New Year’s Day, nearly 20 percent in the last 12 months<br />and roughly 250 percent since the start of the bull market in March 2009.<br />In a telephone conversation, he said that while some of the market’s recent action has been very strong — “a huge move” upward on Wednesday after President Trump’s speech<br />to Congress, for example — the stock market’s path since 2009 has generally “been a series of slow, grinding moves” with little evidence of irrational exuberance.<br />For example, one widely followed metric, the price-to-earnings ratio of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — which<br />tells you how much money is being paid, on average, for $1 of corporate earnings — has become much less favorable.<br />If you don’t need the money for a long while and are able to retain your equanimity in a protracted<br />crisis, you may be able to avoid paying attention to the stock and bond markets.<br />In addition, even if you don’t need to use the money, selling securities that have incurred losses may be a good move, Mr. Birinyi said.
