Materials sector valuation
The U.S. materials sector trades at 23.92 times trailing earnings — the sixth cheapest of the eleven sectors on that measure, and unremarkable against its own past at the 69th percentile.
Since 1979, in the fifth of months when this sector's P/E was at its lowest, aggregate earnings fell over the following year 85% of the time. In the fifth when it was at its highest, they fell 7% of the time. The multiple has been a reliable signal — pointing the opposite way to the one most readers expect.
United States The four headline readings below are for the U.S. materials sector. The same six measures for the global and global ex-U.S. materials sectors are in the table that follows.
| Measure | United States | Global | Global ex-U.S. | U.S. premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trailing P/E | 23.92 | 19.68 | 18.18 | +32% |
| Forward P/E | 17.86 | 15.59 | 14.72 | +21% |
| CAPE | 25.71 | 23.10 | 22.06 | +17% |
| EV/EBITDA | 12.96 | 10.22 | 9.30 | +39% |
| Price to book | 3.43 | — | — | — |
| Dividend yield | 1.50% | — | — | — |
Global covers developed markets, emerging markets and the United States. Global ex-U.S. is the same universe with the United States removed, and still includes both developed and emerging markets. Dividend yield and price to book are published for the U.S. sectors only. Free to reuse with attribution.
Trailing P/E and CAPE, U.S., from 1979. The P/E spikes are earnings collapses, not price surges: the line rises when the denominator falls away.
The same four measures, side by side in each market published. The American premium here is one of the narrower ones and is similar on earnings and on EV/EBITDA.
| Year | Trailing P/E | CAPE |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 25.83 | 23.73 |
| 2024 | 25.48 | 22.83 |
| 2023 | 20.48 | 24.19 |
| 2022 | 14.41 | 23.79 |
| 2021 | 20.54 | 31.89 |
| 2020 | 30.58 | 27.69 |
| 2019 | 22.21 | 24.34 |
| 2018 | 15.12 | 22.39 |
| 2017 | 22.57 | 27.54 |
| 2016 | 27.70 | 22.57 |
The full monthly history from 1979, the dividend yield and price-to-book series, and the global and global ex-U.S. figures are available to subscribers.
United States, Aug 2026
U.S. sector against its own history
Why a low multiple in this sector is a warning
A commodity producer's earnings are the product of volume and a price it does not control. When that price is high, earnings are high, and the trailing P/E — today's share price divided by a peak year of profit — looks cheap. When the price collapses, earnings collapse faster than the share price, and the same multiple looks expensive.
So the multiple moves inversely to the cycle, and reading it the ordinary way inverts the answer.
The record since 1979 states it plainly. Sorting every month by this sector's own trailing P/E and looking at what aggregate earnings did over the following twelve months:
- in the cheapest fifth of months — 103 cases — earnings fell 85% of the
- time, with a median change of -22.3%;
- in the dearest fifth — 103 cases — earnings fell 7% of the time, with a
- median change of +96.6%.
That is not a forecast and it is not advice. It is what the series records, and it means a screen that ranks this sector by trailing P/E is, over the period measured, sorting it by where it stands in the commodity cycle rather than by how cheap it is.
Where the sector stands now
Aggregate earnings grew 23.1% over the last twelve months, against 6.9% a year over five and 10.6% a year over ten. One year running far ahead of the five-year rate is the signature of the upswing described above, not of a change in the sector's long-run earning power — over twenty years the rate is 3.4%.
The trailing P/E is 23.92 and CAPE is 25.71, a ratio of 1.07: current earnings are close to their own inflation-adjusted decade average. The dividend yield is 1.50%, at the 0th percentile of its record since 2005, and price to book is 3.43, at the 95th percentile since 1979.
The four measures do not agree, and the disagreement is the point: the two that use current earnings look moderate, and the two that do not look expensive.
Which measure to use instead
CAPE exists for this problem. Averaging ten years of inflation-adjusted earnings covers at least one full cycle in most commodities, so the denominator is not a single year of a price nobody controls. At 25.71 the sector sits at the 80th percentile of its history since 1984.
Price to book is the other candidate, and for a different reason: a mine or a smelter is a physical asset carried at something related to what it cost, so book value here means more than it does in a sector whose assets are intangible.
Neither is immune. A decade average still contains whatever the decade held, and book value says nothing about whether the asset can be operated profitably at today's prices. But between a multiple that inverts with the cycle and one that averages across it, the choice is not difficult.
Energy shows the same pattern more violently, and is the clearer illustration of what happens when the denominator approaches zero.
The international comparison
American materials companies trade +32% above the rest of the world on trailing earnings, +17% on CAPE and +39% on EV/EBITDA.
Those three figures sitting in a narrow band is itself informative. Where the premiums on equity-only and whole-company measures agree, the difference is not about financing — it is about what the companies are and what they mine, refine or manufacture. A sector defined identically in every market still contains different businesses in each one.
Choosing a measure
No single ratio answers every question about a sector. Each of these pages covers the same eleven sectors — what changes is the question the measure is good at, and how far the coverage reaches.
| Measure | The question it answers | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| EV/EBITDA | How does one sector compare across markets? | Sits above tax and debt, so it survives crossing borders. The only measure here that makes an international sector comparison sound. |
| P/E and earnings | How fast are a sector’s earnings growing? | Trailing and forward multiples with the earnings behind them, so the multiple and its denominator can be read together. |
| CAPE | Is a sector expensive against its own history? | Averages a decade of real earnings, which smooths the cycle out of the denominator. |
| Price to book | What is the market paying for the assets? | Works where earnings-based measures break down — asset-heavy sectors, and banks in particular. U.S. sectors only. |
| Dividend yield | Which sectors pay, and how much? | Income rather than valuation, but it moves inversely with price and is read alongside the multiples. U.S. sectors only. |
Communication Services · Consumer Discretionary · Consumer Staples · Energy · Financials · Health Care · Industrials · Technology · Real Estate · Utilities
All eleven side by side: sector valuations. To compare them on one measure: P/E and earnings · CAPE ratios · EV/EBITDA · Dividend yields · Price to book.
Where this data is used
Some examples. Siblis valuation data appears in peer-reviewed journals, central bank publications and the financial press.
The whole materials history, every trading day
This page publishes ten year-ends and the current reading. The database carries every month back to 1979, for all eleven sectors and every market.
How this is calculated
Every ratio is calculated on the aggregate: the total market capitalisation of the sector's constituents divided by their aggregate earnings, book value or EBITDA, rather than as an average of the constituents' own ratios.
- Trailing P/E — Aggregate normalised net income over the previous twelve months. Major purely accounting gains and losses are removed.
- Forward P/E — Consensus estimates for the next twelve months, aggregated the same way.
- CAPE — Price divided by the average of ten years of inflation-adjusted aggregate earnings.
- Quintile figures — Every month-end since 1979 is ranked by the sector's own trailing P/E; the cheapest and dearest fifths are compared with the change in aggregate trailing earnings over the twelve months that followed. Months whose following year falls outside the series are excluded, which is why the two counts differ slightly.
- Coverage — U.S. series from 1979; global and global ex-U.S. from 1997. Dividend yield and price to book are U.S. only, from 2005 and 1979. The universes are comparable as levels but not as history, because they do not span the same period.
- Earnings growth — Calculated on aggregate sector earnings, not a per-share figure, so it is unaffected by buybacks. The one-year figure compares two month-ends. Rates over five years and longer compare the average of the twelve months at each end, so that one unusual month at the start does not set the whole rate.
- Percentiles — The share of month-ends in that series' own history with a lower reading than the current one.
- Revisions — Figures are point-in-time. If a company later restates its results, the historic reading is left exactly as first published.
Cite this page
Siblis Research. (2026). Materials sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global [Data set]. Retrieved 31 August 2026, from siblisresearch.com/data/materials-sector-valuation/
@misc{siblis_materials_sector_valuation,
title={Materials sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global}, author={{Siblis Research}},
year={2026}, url={https://siblisresearch.com/data/materials-sector-valuation/},
urldate={2026-08-31}} Charts on this page may be reproduced free of charge with attribution to Siblis Research and a link to this page.