Over the weekend, I talked a bit about the read-through of suddenly soft US macro data for corporate America.

Although analysts still expect healthy profit growth this year, a run of lackluster economic readouts and the modeled impact of tariffs together suggest the picture’s less rosy than it was just a few weeks ago.

Throw in the fact that estimates for “Magnificent 7” 2025 EPS growth have stalled, and you’d be forgiven for harboring doubts about the outlook. That isn’t to say the outlook’s dour, let alone dire. It’s just to state the obvious: Doubts are creeping in.

With that in mind, SocGen’s Andrew Lapthorne on Monday said that if you “add up US report and accounts data, the [profit] picture is the weakest since the COVID pandemic.”

After flagging the downtrend in US revisions breadth relative to Europe (where it’s actually turning up), Lapthorne noted that EBIT profits for the S&P 1500 ex-financials are growing 10% per year, a “healthy rate.” But if you strip out the top 120 companies, there was no EBIT growth at all over the last 12 months.

Have a look at the chart on the right, above. Excluding the top (i.e., the largest, by market cap) 10% of companies, both net income and sales growth were negative over the last year.

He summed it up: “US profits are increasingly fragile.”