Monday, September 28, 2009

Earnings Revisions at a Two Year High

This is one of the reasons I said two weeks ago, in "Sign of a top? MarketBeat Asks: "Is the “Bear Market Rally” Theory Dead?":
Nah, not yet. Maybe S&P 1125 (currently 1065), sometime in October. (There! I said it)...
The earnings bar had been set so low that you could just step over it. From Bespoke Investment Group:
While the flow of earnings reports has been slow in recent weeks, analysts have become increasingly bullish on the companies they cover. Our daily tracking of analyst revisions for stocks in the S&P 1500 shows that over the last four weeks, 578 companies in the S&P 1500 have seen their earnings estimates increase, while 389 have seen their numbers cut. This works out to a net of 189, or 12.6% of the index. As shown in the chart below, this is the highest level since at least the start of 2008 (red line), and is a major improvement off of where we were six months ago, when the net earnings revision ratio was closer to "-50%". While analysts are typically thought of as being behind the curve, so far this year they have done a good job of leading the market. When equities bottomed in March (blue line), analyst revisions were already well off their lows of the year....MORE, including a chart of revisions plotted against the S&P (currently 1062.98)