What really matters is whether an index is cheap or expensive.

And if you looked at 1999, it was expensive.

It had been chased up by the dot-com mania, people plowing money into all these things.

If you look at it now on some valuations, it looks reasonable value.

There's a long-term valuation method called CAPE, which takes over 10 years.

It smooths out earnings

and valuations and companies, you know, where they are. And that shows that at the moment,

the UK market is near the cheapest it's been. So that should bode well for the future.

Not cheap, but it's by no means expensive.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not fill your boots,

but it's the kind of thing that looks like it could be decent value over the next decade.

I mean, I wrote something this week that looked at this figure,

and I pulled out some figures that have been done by a company called research affiliates,

and they said that they thought that on this level, over the 10 years the footsie should return 5.7% a year above inflation which is an alarmingly precise prediction

and therefore unlikely to actually happen but what it says is we're in a better position now to

invest than we were in 1999 give us a little bit more history about the Futsi.

What does mean? Who are the big players?

Okay, so if you go back to 1999, I've got this up here on the screen.

In 1999, the biggest company in the Futsi 100 was BP, or BP Amoco, as it was then known.

Then you had BT, Vodafone Air Touch,

as it was called back then, HSBC and Glaxo. Nowadays it looks slightly different and you've got

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