The early 2023 corporate earnings outlooks that companies are issuing alongside actual fourth-quarter results are deteriorating, Bank of America equity and quantitative strategist Savita Subramanian wrote in a report Sunday. As a result, S & P 500 earnings estimates for 2023 have already fallen 1% — but are 10% down from where they were at the peak in June 2022. “[F]orward looking reads are less positive,” the firm’s report said. “Early signs are troubling,” with an in-house “S & P guidance ratio” falling into the 10th percentile, signaling that “corporate misery [is] rising.” The current season has seen just 11 companies issuing forward guidance, but seven of them came in light, while only two beat the consensus, the firm noted. So far in the season for fourth-quarter results, the 52 companies in the S & P 500 — accounting for 14% of total S & P 500 earnings — that have posted earnings are coming in 1% shy of analysts’ estimates whereas they typically beat by half a percentage point, Subramanian said. Financial stocks have done the worst thus far, falling short of estimates by 6%. What’s worse, analysts’ estimates had already fallen 7% coming into the reporting period, Subramanian said. Meanwhile, Lori Calvasina, head of U.S. equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, studied transcripts of management quarterly calls with analysts and investors. She noted the same disconcerting early earnings trend, headlining a report out on Monday with, “EPS Backdrop Continues To Soften.” “While companies have been striking a confident tone, they’ve also been acknowledging rising uncertainty in the outlook that’s impacting the ability to provide guidance,” Calvasina wrote. For example, her 55-page report highlighted a call by Procter & Gamble management last week that expressed a “high degree of uncertainty impacting guidance,” in RBC’s words. “It’s just not an easy time to be taking up guidance to the top range of possibilities,” Procter & Gamble CEO Jon Moeller said on a Jan. 19 call with analysts, according to a FactSet transcript.
