Deep Store

← Headline

SP500_PS_RATIO

S&P 500 price-to-sales — equity price vs aggregate revenue

stale
Frequency: AnnualUnits: Ratio26 observations

Latest value

3.3500

as of 2025-12-31

All-time percentile

98th

1-year change

+12.4%

all-time low: 0.8700all-time high: 3.35

Time series

Showing 5 of 5 data points

About this series

The S&P 500's aggregate market price divided by aggregate revenue (sales). Annual cadence on Multpl.

Why it matters: Price-to-sales sidesteps the accounting noise that makes P/E and P/B unreliable in some regimes (earnings can be negative, manipulated, or one-off; revenue is harder to fake). For that reason it's the favored ratio of value investors during earnings-distorted regimes (recessions, crises) and for high-growth sectors where earnings are reinvested rather than paid out. Hussman, GMO, and others have used aggregate price-to-sales as one of their headline overvaluation signals because it's mechanically harder to bid up than P/E.

How to read it: Long-run average is roughly 1.0-1.5. Sub-1 = historically cheap. Above 2 = elevated. Above 3 has only happened during late-1990s tech mania and the post-2020 era. A standalone elevated P/S reading is one of the most reliable "this market is structurally expensive" signals in the canon.

Caveats: Like P/B, structural drift matters — modern higher-margin tech-heavy index composition mechanically raises P/S vs the older industrial-heavy composition. Some of "today's P/S is high" reflects "today's S&P has higher net margins than 1980's S&P," not pure overvaluation.