Earnings Season Begins
The first of the big banks have reported this morning which means that earnings season is off to the races. For S&P 500 members, Thursday will be the busiest day this week with 17 stocks reporting, and early next week is when the earnings slate really takes off with a total of 44 stocks reporting Tuesday and 47 on Wednesday. As shown below, in addition to having a higher number of stocks reporting, part-way through next week will also account for a significant portion of S&P 500 market cap reporting. On Wednesday (7/23), the first of the mega-caps are up as Alphabet (GOOGL) and Tesla (TSLA) account for nearly half of the over $6 trillion in market cap reporting that day. Most of the rest of the mega-caps will report in the following week with Microsoft (MSFT) starting things off on Tuesday, July 29, with Meta Platforms (META) the next day (7/30), and Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) out the day after that (7/31). While Wal-Mart (WMT) has historically marked the unofficial end of earnings season, nowadays it's NVIDIA (NVDA) that caps things off. WMT is set to report on 8/21, while NVDA is six days later on 8/27.
As noted previously, this week's earnings are dominated by big banks and financial centers. In the chart below, we show the share of stocks from each sector that are reporting each day through the end of August. As shown, the next few days are predominately Financials with Industrials also accounting for a steady share of results (hovering around low double digits). The following few weeks until mid-August (which is the peak of earnings season) has a much greater variety in sectors reporting results whereas the tail end of August is predominately Tech names.
