S&P Earnings Update

I figured I should write a follow up to my post “Don’t Bite on the Cheap Market Bait” with updated earnings and P/E ratio numbers now that 98% of the S&P 500 have submitted their earnings for the quarter.  Earnings actually got worse since my post if you can believe it.   p.s. The S&P has dropped 15.4% since my post.

Operating Earnings for the quarter came in at  -$0.56 and Reported Earnings came in at -$20.73.  This is the first time in the history that the Standard and Poors has been tracking earnings that negative numbers were recorded.

With these numbers it means that even with the big drop we have had in the market the P/E using operating earnings is 14.19 and using reported earnings the P/E is 40.01 . For the difference between operating and reported earnings read the explanation in:  “Don’t Bite on the Cheap Market Bait“  .  Below are some updated charts showing the long term trend and how drastic these earnings shortfalls really are.

My question is why is it that CNBC or even Yahoo Finance don’t point out this huge disruption or update their P/E ratios?  Right now Yahoo Finance has S&P 500 (SPY) with a P/E of 10.72 … no wonder investors get trapped into thinking the market is cheap with info like that.

You can download the earnings spreadsheet from Standard and Poors at this link:  S&P Earnings

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