Stocks Flirting With Lofty Levels Not Seen In 15 Years

The recent selloff notwithstanding, stocks are pricey.

Indeed, the last time the average S&P 500 stock was this expensive, Britney Spears was the hottest name in pop music and the market was on its doomed path toward the meltdown that came to be known as the dot.com bust.

Valuation—a measure of how much stocks are worth using many different metrics including earnings—is near levels seen during the tech-bubble era, according to Savita Subramanian, an equity and quantitative strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.