The current round of US stock earnings reports is not bad: Goldman Sachs data shows that among the S&P 500 companies that have released their second-quarter results, 64% of companies' EPS exceeded the consensus estimate by at least one standard deviation, making it one of the strongest earnings seasons in history and driving an upward revision of the overall EPS forecast for 2027 by about 2%. However, the stock market's reward for these better-than-expected results has been significantly diminished.
Historically, companies whose EPS exceeds expectations by more than one standard deviation typically outperform the S&P 500 by about 95 basis points the following day; this round, it's only about 33 basis points. This is even more pronounced in tech stocks; after the same level of earnings exceeding expectations, they actually lagged behind the S&P by about 99 basis points the following day. This means the current problem is not weakening earnings, but rather that the market's threshold for "good news" has significantly increased: If fundamentals continue to improve but it becomes increasingly difficult to drive stock price increases, subsequent market performance will rely more on new upward earnings revisions than simply repeating strong earnings reports that have already been accepted by the market.
