Halftime Earnings Summary
First quarter corporate earnings were amazing as most companies reported better-than-expected results. About 19% of the S&P500 members published their numbers as of this Friday, 86% of which beat analysts' EPS consensus and 74% of the revenues numbers were on top of expectation. Even thought earnings seemed to be outstanding from the surprise stand point, growth rates were actually weaker relative to last year performances that the average EPS and revenues year-over-year growth went down from 54% to 12% and 10% to 6%, respectively, for the same group of companies. The growth distributions were obviously shifted leftward, which indicated economic slowdown. This might be one of the reasons that earnings reaction were somewhat negative biasing, from the technical perspective, that only 45% of these companies' share closed positive a day after the earnings' announcement. We will continue to see more earnings in this coming week, technology and industrials are the key market movers as these sectors will be reporting the most among the S&P member list.
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