Q4 Earnings Drop Below 10%
With 362 S&P500 companies reporting Q4 earnings, year over year growth is now 9.3%.
An interesting take on this how earnigns are being reported as the Quarter progresses. Birinyi Associates notes that "last quarter, earnings growth steadily climbed to 22.8% as more and more companies reported. This quarter, however, the number has steadily declined since early January."
>
click for larger chart
Chart courtesy of Birinyi Associates
From today's FT:
"The percentage of US companies failing to meet Wall Street's earnings expectations has reached the highest level in more than two years, fuelling fears that corporate America's record run of profit growth will come to an abrupt end.
Concerns of a slowdown in corporate profitability – one of the key reasons for the stock market's record-breaking streak – have been heightened by companies' increasingly bearish outlook on business prospects.
More than 22 per cent of the 400-plus S&P 500 companies to have reported results for the fourth quarter of 2006 failed to meet Wall Street expectations. This is the highest level of "misses" since the third quarter of 2004, according to Reuters Estimates.
The spike in earnings disappointments increases the chances that corporate America will end a three-and-a-half year run of quarterly double-digit profit growth in the last quarter of 2006 rather than at the beginning of 2007, as widely expected."
>
>
Sources:
US slowdown looms as groups miss targets
Francesco Guerrera
FT 1:40 a.m. ET Feb 12, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17104615/
Monday, February 12, 2007 | 11:45 AM | Permalink
| Comments (17)
| TrackBack (0)
add to de.li.cious | 
digg this! | 
add to technorati | 
email this post
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c52a953ef00d834e3608653ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Q4 Earnings Drop Below 10%:
Comments
"The percentage of US companies failing to meet Wall Street's earnings expectations has reached the highest level in more than two years, fuelling fears that corporate America's record run of profit growth will come to an abrupt end."
Come on...are there only 2 speeds to this machine -- full throttle or off?
I thought we all agreed that the economy was slowing down (needed)? The debate here and elsewhere was whether we were falling off a cliff or a soft landing?
Jeesh! So the question frankly is -- is > 9% eps GROWTH (in the face of the slow down) that bad?
Place yer bets!
Posted by: Fred | Feb 12, 2007 12:47:23 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
