Q4 Earnings Start Revving Up
Another week in earnings season, another update from the famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker. We now have Q4 earnings data from more than 320 non-financial firms — and so far, those firms are reporting impressive net income growth from the year-ago period. Figure 1, below, is this week’s snapshot. Net income is up 15.1 percent from one year ago, revenue is up 6 percent, and cash from operations is up 25.1 percent. All numbers moving in the direction Wall Street wants to see. If you want to worry about anything, you could fret over cost of revenue, operating expenses, and SG&A expenses — all of which are currently rising faster than overall revenue, which implies that companies will start to feel inflationary pressures sometime soon. Then again, we still have a relatively small number of companies in our sample size, and the picture could look quite different in another four weeks or so, when we’ll have nearly 10 times as many earnings releases to digest. Figure 2, below, shows th...