The Q3 earnings season floodgates are about to open up. In the next four weeks more than 1600 companies will announce their quarterly results. The last several quarters have seen unprecedented levels of earnings outperformance. Our analysis suggests that this quarter’s beats may be among the biggest.
While it is interesting to think about the reasons the gap between the consensus and actual results has grown so wide since the pandemic began, we will leave this discussion for another day. What is important right now is that we are an environment where most companies are firmly expected to beat their numbers, and that makes the magnitude of their outperformance the salient question. Fortunately, our AI’s earnings forecasts are here to help you answer it.
Weekly rundown
Below are our AI’s most important EPS estimates for this week. We also take this opportunity to see how well the experimental early forecasts we published three weeks ago for some of these giants are holding up. (The answer, as you will see: they are holding up very well.)
- Tesla (TSLA): $1.77 Proximilar’s AI earnings forecast (was $1.56 on September 28) vs. $1.54 Street analyst consensus EPS
- Paypal Holdings (PYPL): $1.16 our AI earnings forecast (unchanged from 9/28) vs. $1.08 consensus EPS
- Netflix (NFLX): $2.58 our EPS forecast (was $2.56) vs. $2.57 consensus
- Intel (INTC): $1.22 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $1.12 consensus
- Snap (SNAP): $0.11 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $0.08 consensus
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): $2.55 our forecast vs. $2.35 consensus
- Procter & Gamble (PG): $1.68 our forecast vs. $1.58 consensus
- Verizon (VZ): $1.40 our forecast vs. $1.36 consensus
- AT&T (T): $0.83 our forecast vs. $0.78 consensus
- International Business Machines (IBM): $2.70 our forecast vs. $2.53 consensus
- Blackstone (BX): $1.00 our forecast vs. $0.90 consensus
- Lam Research (LRCX): $8.69 our forecast vs. $8.23 consensus
- Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG): $6.88 our forecast vs. $6.30 consensus
It is worth highlighting this $0.22 increase in our forecast for TSLA. It constitutes a 13% jump relative to the baseline forecast, which we consider significant. Looking at Tesla stock’s strong performance over the last 3 weeks one can surmise that the market’s expectations have also been revised upwards during this time.
The Big 20, revisited
Let’s also provide a point of comparison to our late September predictions for some of next week’s announcements. Again, with very few exceptions our initial forecasts remain stable. AMZN saw the biggest forecast decline, while GOOGL is showing a slight increase:
- Apple (AAPL): $1.36 our forecast (unchanged from 9/28) vs. $1.24 consensus
- Microsoft (MSFT): $2.24 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $2.07 consensus
- Alphabet (GOOGL): $27.14 our forecast (was $26.78) vs. $23.74 consensus
- Amazon (AMZN): $11.18 our forecast (was $11.46) vs. $8.90 consensus
- Facebook (FB): $3.67 our forecast (was $3.70) vs. $3.17 consensus
- Visa (V): $1.64 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $1.55 consensus
- Mastercard (MA): $2.29 our forecast (was $2.31) vs. $2.18 consensus
- Exxon Mobil (XOM): $1.63 our forecast (was $1.55) vs. $1.50 consensus
- Shopify (SHOP): $1.94 our forecast (was $1.90) vs. $1.24 consensus
- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): $0.75 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $0.66 consensus
- Twitter (TWTR): $0.23 our forecast (unchanged) vs. $0.17 consensus