Do you know each other? schoolgirl And in the second case, there's no getting around the fact that valuations are higher than the long-run average. As of Friday, the S&P 500 was trading at 17.83 times earnings. And if you take the past 10 years into consideration, it's an even dearer 23.77 times earnings as of the middle of this month. By comparison, the average multiple since the 1880s is only 16.49 times earnings.