Everyone Expected Earnings Season To Be Really Weak - Look What Actually Happened

More bad news for the bears.

Q1 earnings - despite widespread expectations that they were going to be weak, and possibly show a year-over-year decline in EPS - are actually doing good.

That's what Dan Greenhaus of BTIG (@danBTIG) points out in a note to clients this morning.

He writes:

Earnings season was supposed to go terribly. Television news was littered (again) with people discussing the downward trend (again) in expected earnings and by extension, the negative impulse such an earnings season would apply to stocks. We did not believe this to be the case, arguing that earnings growth was likely to be in the 1-3% range and as we find ourselves half way through earnings season, that forecast is looking to be accurate, albeit in the middle of the range. Earnings from Utilities and Energy names have been excellent while buy rated AAPL reported sales figures roughly $2 billion above analyst estimates; somewhat unsurprisingly, the utility and energy sectors are the two best performers in the S&P 500 since the start of April. Similarly, telecom (VZ) is having a hard earnings season and its price performance has been poor.

Here's some charts that show the nice performance. You can see how EPS growth expectations have spiked nicely in recent weeks, while companies across all sizes are showing nice revenue growth.