00:00 Speaker A
Great to have you with us this morning. So let’s just kind of lay out everything on the table for the expectations of what this earning season could look like.
00:16 Speaker B
Yeah, first thanks for having me. It’s going to be a really interesting ride for the first quarter. Our guidance model, which utilizes company guidance uh to predict earnings trends, suggests that this should this may actually be the first earnings miss that we’ve experienced for the S&P 500 since 2020, as we did see pretty rapid deterioration in economic conditions in the latter half of the first quarter. We saw businesses basically pull back and go kind of on hold, frankly, in anticipation of the tariffs that were just announced last week. We also continue to see margins under some degree of pressure in the tech space, reflecting the new era of global competition that has emerged in the first quarter. So it should be a very interesting quarter. All in all, we’re looking at analyst consensus sitting at about a 6.7% year-over-year growth rate. That’s 6.4% for EPS. Uh this is the slowest pace of earnings growth in a year. So we are seeing a significant slowdown after double digit growth in the fourth quarter as well. And about half six of the 11 GICS sectors are actually expected to show declines on a year ago basis. So we are starting to see some signs of earnings weakening here in 2025.