At this point we are a third of the way through earnings season (at least by SP 500 standards)… so what have we learned so far? From my perspective the biggest surprise is that we haven’t done worse, so far from the 31% of companies that have reported 57% have beat or met expectations. This shows that for the most part analysts have a fairly good job of predicting earnings this season. Now if you dive deeper into the numbers you can see there are two really bad sectors that analysts have had a very poor time predicting, those two sectors are Telecomm (100% missed) and Financials (75% missed). This information shows that we may have a little more time before we start to see the financial sector turn around, for the most part we need companies to start beating expectations before a sector will turn around. This idea can be shown in the Energy sector where so far 67% of the companies have either beat or met earnings expectations. We will continue to monitor the data as we continue through earnings season, hoping that the data will continue to improve, giving further evidence of a bottom placed in the stock market.
As we continue further along in the earnings season keep a watch for future updates. DC
Data above provided by Starmine/Thompson data services.