Wall St profit growth may return in Q2

FE Team | Published: July 05, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

NEW YORK, July 4 (Reuters): With all the hoopla over the Dow topping 17,000 out of the way, the market's next focus will be whether the fast-approaching earnings season can justify US stocks continuing their climb further into record territory.
Many factors point to a second-quarter earnings season poised to surprise substantially to the upside, with an outside chance that profits for S&P 500 companies could return to double-digit growth for the first time in nearly three years.
On the heels of Thursday's strong US employment report, some economists have begun talking up prospects for a 4.0 per cent annual growth rate in gross domestic product for the April-through-June period, a dramatic snap back from the first quarter's contraction of 2.9 per cent.
"It's a strong report that capped off a strong quarter. Everything in the report points to 4 per cent growth in the second quarter," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh, referring to the jump in June's nonfarm payrolls.
Analysts polled by Reuters are calling for earnings growth for the second quarter of 6.2 per cent, and a return to double digits in the third and fourth quarters: 10.9 per cent and 11.9 per cent, respectively. The last time that S&P 500 earnings achieved double-digit per centage growth was the third quarter of 2011 - at 18 per cent.
But some signs suggest the 10 per cent handle could be breached a quarter earlier by the time all of the second-quarter numbers are in.
"There is a chance that earnings could see double digits this quarter, but only a very slim chance. The strong jobs report today can translate to better earnings after a period of time but it can't be immediate," said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer at Solaris Group in Bedford Hills, New York.
First, earnings pre-announcements from companies have the most positive skew in six quarters.
Of 133 pre-announcements from S&P 500 components so far, 97 have been negative, 24 positive and 12 in line with existing forecasts, according to Thomson Reuters data. That puts the negative-to-positive ratio at 4-to-1 for the second quarter, the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2012. Moreover, that compares with 5.9-to-1 in the first quarter and 5.5-to-1 a year earlier in the second quarter of 2013.
Second, actual earnings growth tends to exceed forecast growth by a sizable margin, because companies and the analysts who track them tend to underestimate profits.
Since the fourth quarter of 2009 when corporate profits returned to growth after the recession, actual S&P 500 earnings growth at the end of each quarterly reporting cycle exceeded the growth forecast at the start of each reporting period by an average of 5.7 per centage points.
Even factoring out the outsized profit growth rates in the first six quarters following the recession, earnings have come in an average of nearly 3 per centage points higher than were forecast at the start of each reporting season.
In the first quarter, for example, the profit growth rate on April 1 was pegged at 2.1 per cent. When the numbers from all 500 companies in the index were tallied, though, it was actually 5.6 per cent, 3.5 per centage points higher.