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Earnings season has gotten off to a strong start, but all sectors aren’t created equally.
Click here to find out how to profit from a struggling sector.
With about 50% of S&P 500 companies having reported, this has been one of the strongest earnings seasons in a while. So far, results have been running about 2% above consensus estimates. 2% might not sound like much, but that’s literally created billions of dollars’ worth of new wealth.
While S&P 500 companies may be turning in one of their best quarters, the tech sector is having one of its worst earnings seasons in years.
Large data-center providers have reduced spending, dinging semiconductor and equipment makers. Hardware and storage peripheral makers have also been hit as cloud service providers have slowed down their buildouts.
All told, the S&P 500’s information technology sector is expected to see earnings decline more than 10% this quarter from a year earlier. One issue has been a slowdown in the PC refresh cycle as consumers hold onto their old computers longer in anticipating of better models being released. The U.S.-China trade war has also been blowing up a headwind as many big tech companies can’t sell into what was one of their biggest markets.
For instance, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) rose in the immediate aftermath of its earnings report. The company said its data center business had grown 4% in the quarter, rather than contracting as the market had expected. But buried deeper in the report, the company said that was because $200 million of orders came in the third quarter to beat expected tariffs. After trading higher the day of the report, shares fell back to earth the next day.
There have been some bright spots, though. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported earnings per share of $1.38, compared to the $1.25 analysts were expecting. Revenue also rose 14% to hit $33.06 billion, even though analysts were only looking for $32.23 billion.
I bring up Microsoft because it’s a solid example of how our Overnight Trading System works.
It identified Microsoft as a prime overnight trade. It opened in the hours before Microsoft’s after-hours earnings announcement and was closed the next day.
In all, it was on for about 22 hours and generated a 20.5% return. If you’d have invested $5,000 in the trade, you would have made about $1,025.
There aren’t many things you can do to make $1,000+ while you sleep.
And you can rack those up all earnings season. That’s not saying every trade is a winner, but more win than lose. As in, starting out with just $5,000, you could make $196,898 in profits . . . and Microsoft is just a recent example of how.
Click here find out how you can lock in those returns yourself.
It’s simple and takes just a few minutes a day during earnings season. But the strategy can grow your portfolio exponentially.
Register here to find out how.
Here’s to Profits,
Ben Shepherd