Our latest US earnings update for Q4 2023.

It’s Robert Talevski from the Activam Group. And today I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on the earnings season in the US.

So US earnings reporting season for Q4 2023 has come to a close and these quarterly earnings updates provide us with a valuable insight into how companies are performing and how they might perform going forward from an earnings perspective.

So here are the key takeaways according to Fact Set

5% overall growth in earnings for Q4 overall for the S&P 500 companies a year-on-year. That’s the second straight quarter of the year-on-year growth.

73% of S&P 500 companies reported earnings per share actually better than what they initially anticipated.

Communication sectors earnings were up around about 40%. Equally, utilities and tech sectors did pretty well. On the other hand, the energy sector didn’t do so well from an earnings perspective. It was down around 20%.

73 of the S&P 500 companies issued negatives earnings per share guidance that’s something to keep in mind going forward.

Inflation remains a hot topic just under half of the S&P 500 companies mentioned inflation in their earnings update.

So overall a pretty good result for the S&P 500 company earning season this should be positive and support equity markets going forward.