Right now Wall Street analysts project that on Thursday, January 19, Netflix (NFLX) will report earnings of just 44 cents a share for the fourth quarter of 2022. That would be a huge drop from the $1.33 the company reported in the fourth quarter of 2021.
If Netflix reports as expected, will the stock market shudder lower? After all, the Netflix results would be very similar to the negative reports from the big banks so far this earnings season. And it might foreshadow disappointing earnings from the technology companies that began reporting on January 24 with Microsoft (MSFT).
Probably not. Although I think it should.
Right now the wider stock market seems relatively impervious to bad earnings news from individual stocks (or even sectors.) Today, for example, Goldman Sachs (GS) reported its biggest earnings miss in a decade. the shares dropped 7% ut the Standard & Poor’s 500 finished off just 0.20% although the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 1.14%. The NASDAQ Composite, on the other hand, managed to climb 0.14%.
My take is that most investors and traders are convinced that the Federal Reserve will signal that an end to interest rate increases is just around the corner when its Open Market Committee reports on February 1. And that they don’t want to sell anything ahead of the rally they believe that would set off.
This positioning comes even though big banks–and Goldman’s guidance on the economy was very dark today–are warning that a recession is a very real possibility in 2023.
This all makes me wonder 1) how much more bad news the market can take before it is reflected in the major indexes (the S&P 500 continues to hang near 4,000) and 2) if there is a rally on the Federal Reserves’s “signal” how long it might last?
