A closer look at the earnings season

In our previous post we looked at the different sectors and sub-industries, that make up the S & P 500 index. Now we take a closer look at a "typical" earnings season and focus on some individual sub-industries. In our example below we are only looking at stocks belonging to the financials sector and in particular only three different sub-industries: Banks, Diversified financial services and REITs. The chart shows the number of S&P 500 companies filing their earnings results each day colored by the sub-industry.

We can find some interesting things:

1. Almost all the banks are filing closely together within 10 days (this time the x-axis shows days not weeks).
2. There is a certain sequence in the sub-industries: The banks come first, then the diversified financial services companies and last the REITs.
3. There is of course some overlap between the different sub-industries.

If we would check other sectors and sub-industries, we could find more examples. Some might be not so pronounce, some maybe even more. In one of the next post we are going to examine the same thing on an individual company level for one particular sub-industry.