For S&P 500, Expensive Is New Cheap as Bull Market Plods On

Rarely has it cost so much to purchase low-priced stocks.

With oil’s rebound helping U.S. energy producers recover from a 27 percent plunge, the least-expensive industry in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index just became banks, where the median company trades at 17.6 times earnings from the past 12 months. That’s no bargain: only once has the cheapest sector commanded a higher valuation, a quarter century of data compiled by Bloomberg and Leuthold Group show.