The first-quarter earning season has been a very strong one for most corporations. With about half the S&P 500 having filed their reports, earnings are up 17 percent over last year. And that's disregarding financial companies, whose losses in 2009 would badly skew the numbers even further. Sales, overall, are up 9 percent from last year.
When all the figures are in, S&P has estimated that earnings will increase by about 32 percent over 2009. That's almost entirely a reflection of the strong earnings that we've seen reported already; before this earnings season began, Standard & Poor's had forecast that earnings would be up a mere 9.8 percent this year.
This sort of outperformance has become a real trend. Bloomberg found that the profits of 70 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 have exceeded analysts' estimates for each of the past six quarters. Companies do have a tendency to beat the estimates, as we've discussed before, but that's still a nice little winning streak.
No comments:
Post a Comment