The week is winding down in the US stocks in what was the “Big Week” for earnings.
Safe to say, the week was not as bad as the market expected. Looking at the major indices, the indices are currently showing:
- Dow up 5.52%
- S&P up 3.67%
- Nasdaq up 1.87%.
So how did the list of the biggest names do relative to the S&P index?
Below is a list of most of the “biggest” names that announced earnings this week. By no means does it represent all the names, but safe to say it shows the success of the week. Of the 51 companies on the list 33 of them outperformed the S&P, while 18 did worse than the S&P.
The biggest gainer was Wingstop which announce better earnings and lower costs. The price of chicken wings have moved lower, but safe to say, Wingstop have increased prices and benefitted from the higher revenues, without the corresponding higher costs.
The biggest loser was Meta which is dealing with costs soaring as a result of their plunge into to so-called metaverse.
Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are also lower as earnings and forward guidance has started to weigh on the stock prices for those past mega stars (and thought to be safe havens).
Those companies also suffer from the “big number” problem. On the margin, it is simply hard to keep on increasing revenues, or customers (or whatever metric) at a double digit pace. When limits start to be met because growth trajectories slow, there can also impact on multiples as investors start to discount the trajectory of those future earnings .
When earnings are lower or slowing, and multiples are lower, that is the recipe for lower stock prices.
In the first phase of the price decline, we saw the declines in the ultra speculative issues that had multiples well over market averages. This week was about some of the mega cap safe players feel some of the impact of mulitiples being to high given growth trajectories.