Wednesday, April 22, 2015

A Snapshot of Earnings Season

We're far enough into this quarter's earnings season to get a pretty realistic picture of what it's going to look like. We've had 77 companies in the S&P 500 report so far, and by the end of the week, that number will be up to 146.

In one sense, it hasn't been so good. Among those 77 companies, first-quarter earnings are on track to fall by 4.2 percent from a year ago, according to data compiled by FactSet.

But in another sense, those falling earnings have already been incorporated into stock prices. Analysts had already reduced their earnings estimates on many companies - and those companies are beating them. About 79 percent of the S&P 500 companies that have reported so far have outpaced those lowered earnings estimates.

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