According to Zacks, roughly 70% of companies in the S&P 500 will see their earnings per share drop by 14%. Adjusted for the market-cap weighting of the index itself, the per share profits should fall 15.4%.

For the sake of irony, let’s assume that we were sitting at “fair value” on the S&P 500 at the start of trading on 9/22/08. Then, the benchmark was at 1255. One year later, we’d expect the S&P 500 to rest -15.4% lower at 1062. Where did the market close on 9/21/09… 1063, 1064?