Every three months, in the middle of each financial quarter, we've been taking a snapshot of the earnings per share for the S&P 500 that are expected going forward for as far as Standard & Poor projects them. In our last installment, we saw that there had continued to be a large amount of erosion in the expectations for stock market earnings in future quarters.
This time however, it would appear that the outlook for future earnings has stabilized, which would be a positive development.
We see that there has been some minor erosion in the very near term, or rather, the expectations through the end of 2014-Q3, which are still being reported, but we see that there has also been some minor improvement in the expectations for quarters following 2015-Q1. Overall however, the most significant takeaway from the changes since August 2014 is how little the expectations of future earnings per share have changed during the last three months.
Still, it's a good time to point out, once again, how volatile the expectations for the S&P 500's earnings per share are over time. It's a good thing that the expectations for these earnings have so little impact upon stock prices!