The price to earnings ratio tells you how many years of earnings it would take to get back what you pay for a stock. In a healthy, normal market, the P/E ratio is about 16. That means, it would take 16 years for a stocks’ earnings to equal the price. But right now, the average stock in the S&P 500 has a p/e of 35. That’s over twice the historical ratio! Now there have been two other times in history that the p/e ratio has been this high. The first was right before the market crash in 1929….