Just How Pricey Is This Stock Market?

Even with this year's surging corporate profits, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is trading at historically sky-high price-to-earnings ratios. Many "experts" seem to agree that the stock market is monstrously overpriced.

But maybe it's not.

Let's look at P/E ratios and see where we really are. Price-to-earnings, for the uninitiated, is simply a stock's share price divided by its earnings per share. This ratio provides a straightforward measure of how cheap or dear stocks are. But the confusion