Earnings Data Deluge This Week
Pre-market futures have retreated to strategies we saw earlier in the week: tacking on either side of the zero-line and walking it forward without excessive volatility. (In fact, the VIX, which tracks market volatility overall, has been at historically low levels all week.) The Dow is +18 points at this hour, while the S&P 500 is -2 points. The Nasdaq is currently -35 points. This follows an overall down day on the markets yesterday.
There are no major economic reports out during today’s pre-market, after which we’ll see new S&P Flash PMI data on both Manufacturing and Services — yet another metric depicting the health of certain aspects of the economy in the weeks ahead of the next Fed meeting on interest rates. Both Manufacturing and Services are expected to tick down a tad, to 51.5 and 49.0, respectively — notably, on either side of the critical 50 level between growth and loss.
Procter & Gamble PG put out a strong quarterly report this morning, beating estimates on both top and bottom lines by roughly 4%. Fiscal Q3 earnings of $1.37 per share outpaced the Zacks consensus by 5 cents and swung to a one-penny gain year over year. This marks the third quarter in the past four of earnings beats. Revenues came in at $20.07 billion for the parent company of Tide, Bounty, Charmin, Head & Shoulders, Old Spice, Febreze, Swiffer and Dawn, among others.
Guidance for organic sales was raised from 4-5% to 6% on stronger product pricing, including in its Gillette business. The company was also careful to explain that there is evidence consumers are being more careful with their purchases, which may offer us a glance at how the consumer is beginning to balk at buying overpriced goods, which naturally needs to happen in order to curb inflation. P&G stock is now also positive for the year on +2.3% gains in early trading today.
Next week, the cavalcade of Q1 earnings reports upshifts to a higher gear, with Alphabet GOOGL, Amazon AMZN, Boeing BA and Caterpillar CAT all reporting — and that’s just the top ABCs. But perhaps no earnings results will be more finely parsed than those of First Republic FRC, the San Francisco-based regional bank caught up in the Silicon Valley bank destabilization a month ago — shares are -88% year to date. Expectations are for earnings to tumble -64% year over year, -19% on revenues. This perhaps primes the pump for a positive surprise; the bank has not missed on earnings in nearly four years.
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