Fighting the Whisper Number: Netflix, Apple, Coca-Cola and More

The earnings season is ramping up — nearly 1000 companies will announce their results between now and the end of July. Which of them will beat the Wall Street consensus and their whisper numbers? We are here to help you sort through this flood of data. All of our AI’s latest earnings forecasts are now posted on our site.

Last week we said that our AI’s earnings estimates paint an optimistic picture, and this continues to be true because the vast majority of our forecasted surprises are positive. Financial institutions started the earnings season off with a series of impressive EPS beats. Now we expect other sectors to pick up where the big banks left off.

Battling the whisper number

With so many companies expected to beat consensus expectations, let’s set a higher bar and ask which of them might also beat their whisper number. The largest group of companies are those we expect to beat their whispers. Some of the big names in this category include:

  • Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): $2.46 Proximilar’s AI forecast vs. $2.41 whisper number
  • Verizon (VZ): $1.34 Proximilar vs. $1.31 whisper
  • Danaher (DHR): our $2.31 vs. $2.21 earnings whisper
  • American Airlines (AAL): our -$2.02 vs. -$2.05 earnings whisper
  • Honeywell (HON): our $2.03 vs. $1.98 whisper number
  • Dow (DOW): our $2.56 vs. $2.49 whisper

Our AI-projected EPS for Netflix (NFLX), Coca-Cola (KO), AT&T (T), Twitter (TWTR) and Logitech (LOGI) are all within about a penny of their whisper numbers. You could say, therefore, that for these stocks the comparison against whisper numbers is too close to call. (We do project a large revenue surprise for Logitech, however.)

Finally, there is a group of companies which the artificial intelligence expects to beat the analyst consensus but fall short of the whisper. These include both Intel (INTC) and Abbot Labs (ABT). Our earnings forecasts stand about 2 cents below the whisper number for both of these names.

Looking ahead to next week

It may be a bit early to focus on tech giants like Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN) and Tesla (TSLA), since their highly anticipated announcements are more than a week away, and our models may adjust their forecasts in the meantime. However, as things stand, our AI projects an EPS surprise of $0.13 for AAPL, which is about $0.04 below Apple’s whisper.

Things look better for Amazon and Tesla. We currently expect AMZN earnings to come in at $14.98 (a forecasted surprise of $2.77), which is above the $14.87 whisper number. For Tesla, the current whisper number is negative 5 cents, while Proximilar AI anticipates EPS roughly in line with expectations and a $600 million outperformance on revenues.

We can only cover a small sliver of the upcoming earnings releases in this brief post. For the full picture, incuding EPS estimates, revenue forecasts, stocks’ reactions to announcements, and much more, click the button below and get all of Proximilar’s forecasts delivered to your mailbox in seconds.

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