Tag Archives: earnings

The third quarter wasn’t kind to U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 fell 6.4 percent, with stocks battered by everything from fears over China’s growth slowdown and financial market collapse to uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In June, the consensus view on third-quarter earnings was a 1 percent decline. Heading into earnings season, that figure has been revised downward to a 5 percent decrease. With the fourth quarter underway, none of the issues that...

As the second-quarter earnings season draws to a close in the United States, with 89 percent of companies in the S&P 500 having announced quarterly results, there’s both good and bad news to report. Sugar first: Seventy-four percent of companies beat consensus estimates, slightly better than the 10-year average of 70 percent. The outlook for the future is getting rosier, too. The consensus forecast for 12-month forward earnings growth is now 7.2 percent, up from 5.2 percent at the...