Earnings season is now nearly concluded, with 80 percent of the stocks in the S&P 500 having reported their earnings for 2014's fourth quarter. And the results have been very encouraging, with earnings up 9.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2013.
Individual stocks have benefited greatly from those kinds of reports. Bespoke Investment Research tracked the performance of companies on the day they issued their report, and found that they increased by average of 0.84 percent. That's a bigger average gain than any earnings quarter since 2009.
Those numbers help explain why the S&P 500 has bounced back so strongly in recent weeks. By the beginning of February, the S&P had dropped nearly 6 percent on the year. But it has made almost all of that ground back, and now stands down just 0.7 percent for 2014.
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