- On Tuesday, banks kicked off the first earnings season to take place amid the coronavirus pandemic.
- Goldman Sachs wrote in a Monday note that while quarterly earnings will contain less useful information than typical reports, the season will contain "key signals for forward looking investors."
- Here are three key themes the firm said investors should look for in earnings reports and management calls.
- Read more on Business Insider.
Tuesday marked the start of an uncertain earnings season, the first to show the early impact of the coronavirus pandemic on corporations.
Goldman Sachs wrote in a Monday note that while quarterly earnings will contain less useful information than typical reports, the season will contain "key signals for forward looking investors."
"Most firms are unlikely to provide formal guidance, but alongside the backward-looking results will be useful insights into the extent of the virus' impact on earnings and what to expect going forward," analysts led by David Kostin wrote Monday.
Goldman's advice to look forward comes amid the first earnings season during the coronavirus pandemic, which will give investors a glimpse of how corporations fared early on in the outbreak. On Tuesday, banks kicked off the earings season - JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo reported worse results than expected. Still, the stocks rose.
Current expectations of the earnings season are that companies will show much worse growth than consensus estimates, and post the lowest quarterly earnings-per-share growth since 2009, according to Goldman Sachs.
Investors are concerned that the first quarter 2020 earnings season will "inevitably lead to a wave of downward revisions to analyst estimates, meaning the implied equity risk premium will fall - and the consensus P/E multiple will rise - even with no change in the S&P 500 price," Kostin wrote.
Goldman forecasts that S&P 500 earnings per share will decline 15% in the first quarter on the year, according to the Monday note. The firm's baseline forecast for 2020 is that S&P 500 earnings per share will decline by 33% to $110, but be followed by a rebound in 2021.
Still, Goldman does not expect the weak earnings to significantly weigh on the stock market.
"Rarely has the information content of quarterly earnings reports been as outdated as the figures US companies will release starting this week," Kostin said. "We expect investors will mostly 'look through' reported 1Q results, which will capture only the start of shutdowns that began at the end of the quarter."
Here are three key themes that the firm recommends investors look for in reports and management calls:
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