So Far, These Are The 5 Hottest Stocks Of January's Earnings Season
The first two weeks of the 2014 January earnings season are now in the books. Here are the 5 biggest winners that have everybody on Wall Street talking.
The information below is derived from data submitted to the Estimize platform by a set of Buy Side and Independent analyst contributors.
1. Bank of America (BAC) 1/15/13
The first major earnings winner of the year was Bank of America. Bank of America reported 29c earnings-per-share beating the profit expectations from both Wall Street and Estimize.com. Throughout the quarter expectations surged and the company stock was up close to 20%.
Throughout the past 7 quarters Estimize.com has been more accurate in forecasting Bank of America's EPS and revenue 6 and 5 times respectively. By tapping into a wider range of contributors including hedge-fund analysts, asset managers, independent research shops, students, and non professional investors Estimize has created a data set that is up to 69.5% more accurate than Wall Street, but more importantly it does a better job of representing the market's actual expectations.
It has been confirmed by an independent academic study from Rice University that stock prices tend to react with a more strongly associated degree to the expectation benchmark from Estimize than from the Wall Street consensus.
2. BlackRock (BLK) 1/16/13
BlackRock crushed everyone's expectations last week. BlackRock has seen growth throughout the past few fiscal quarters, analysts attribute BLK's recent successes to the growth in its risk management and equities divisions. 2013 was a particularly good year for US Stocks and BlackRock was well positioned to capitalize from the bull market as an asset management firm. And with investors increasingly buying indexed funds and ETFs, iShares could be a hot commodity for BlackRock in 2014.
3. Goldman Sachs (GS) 1/16/13
Over the previous 2 years Goldman Sachs has a great track record of beating Wall Street on profit. This quarter was the first time in 2 years the Estimize consensus was less accurate than Wall Street because analysts on the platform took a more bearish view than the Street this quarter.
4. Netflix (NFLX) 1/22/13
If I had to crown a large company as the single champion from the January 2014 earnings season so far, it would have to be Netflix. Netflix went above and beyond in terms of growing its profit at a rate that no one anticipated. While Netflix stock was up 15% in response to the report and is flying high now, the future is looking a little less certain. Recently the FCC guidelines for net neutrality were struck down by the court which could force Netflix to pay Internet Service Providers for the quantity of data users consume. This could cut into profit margins and increased competition from Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime Instant Video, and HBO Go are also of concern.
5. Microsoft (MSFT) 1/23/13
Microsoft surprised investors with a big quarter. Advertising revenue from the company's search engine Bing were up 34% and device and consumer sales grew 13%, mostly thanks to Surface, Microsoft's tablet. Microsoft has been searching for a replacement for CEO Steve Ballmer since August when he announced his intention to retire within a year. Microsoft has hinted in recent days that a suitable replacement may have been found, but no official announcement has yet been made.
Get access to estimates published by your Buy Side and Independent analyst peers and follow the rest of earnings season by heading over to Estimize.com. Register for free to create your own estimates and see how you stack up to Wall Street.
More from Estimize.com:
- Top 5 Winners From January Earnings Season so Far
- What To Know About eBay Earnings and the Growing Threat from Amazon
- Here's How The Buy Side Expects Bristol-Myers Squibb to Report Friday
- Here's How the Buy Side Expects Honeywell to Report Friday
- Here's What the Buy Side Expects from Procter and Gamble