Earnings Season’s Here! What To Expect From Corporate America
Earnings season's here! Who's excited?
If your hand's raised, you need to get out more.
I'm just joking. Everyone loves earnings season. It's a time to celebrate companies which, through contrivance and connivance, managed to make more money than expected over a given three-month window. Anything goes. All's fair in love, war and capitalism.
Last quarter, corporate America easily hurdled the bar, reporting 8% EPS growth in aggregate, a pace more than double that seen by bottom-up company anal
1) The consumer’s resilient = the public is a bunch of suckers who represent the largest standing body of marks for the corporate con men to take to the 10.9% cleaners. We will never learn. That’s the hallmark of the US economy.
I’ll admit it, I love earnings season.
Investing, properly done, isn’t even remotely interesting. Paraphrasing Tom McEvoy (who was talking about poker), investing is years of boredom punctuated by moments of shear terror.
I know you know that given the number of laments you’ve penned while repetitiously covering the same dry data points that inevitably just paint another gray shade on a fully socialized gray narrative everyone already knows. Make no mistake, I read them all, but I find economics interesting. Don’t judge.
But earnings season? That has spice. I’m a stock picker despite being fully cognizant that buy-and-hold ETF long only rebalance annually investing is the optimal path. I mean, I still mostly just buy and hold ETFs, but I can’t resist my dumb longs.
That said, earnings calls are the best. Listening to executives trying to spit shine turds as analysts pay them compliments while asking condescendingly obnoxious passive-aggressive questions? It’s the best.
I should get out more.
What I wouldn’t give for an edit function.
Sheer, not shear, assuming you’re not a sheep farmer.
Well said. Someone is probably getting sheared.
Funny post that is totally relatable.
From a reliable source:
“While analysts lowered Q1 earnings estimates for S&P 500 companies by a smaller margin than average, have fewer S&P 500 companies issued negative EPS guidance than average for Q1 as well? The answer is no. Both the number and percentage of S&P 500 companies issuing negative EPS guidance for Q1 2024 are above their recent averages.”
Expectations management is in full swing.
I like earnings season. I’m no longer in the game of betting on what metrics investors will care about and if the report and guide will beat or miss the whispers, but I still maintain and update quarterly models for most owned names, so earnings season is a lot of work, but you can also get nice hits of gratification aka dopamine, along with disappointment aka depression, every week is a mini rollercoaster and the game aspect of what we do is at its most transparent.