Every three months, we take a snapshot of the expectations for future earnings in the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) at approximately the midpoint of the current quarter, shortly after most U.S. firms have announced their previous quarter's earnings.
Or we did, up until this month. The man behind the data we've visualized for this feature, Standard and Poor's Howard Silverblatt, retired on 31 January 2026 after 48 years, 8 months, 14 days at S&P!
Benedek Vörös, S&P Dow Jones' Index Investment Strategy Director, marked the career milestone just before Howard's final day on the job:
This week has given the markets plenty to digest. But for many of us at S&P Dow Jones Indices, the most significant data point isn't on the tape. It’s on the calendar. Tomorrow marks the final day of Howard Silverblatt’s legendary 49-year tenure at our firm. For five decades, Howard’s definitive voice tracked the ebb and flow of the world’s most prominent index with a precision that turned financial math into a narrative art form. Whether he was breaking down S&P 500®, buyback yields for the Wall Street Journal or explaining the compounding power of dividends on CNBC, Howard taught a generation of investors that while price is what you pay, the underlying cash flow is what you get.
We hope S&P continues regularly publishing the data series Howard routinely made freely available at the S&P 500's official home on the internet. Including the earnings expectations we're featuring in this article.
Although we pulled the data on 13 February 2026 and referenced that date in the following chart, our Winter 2026 snapshot was really taken on 31 January 2026 and has been pulled from Howard's final Earnings & Estimates spreadsheet, which he posted on his last day on the job! The following chart presents how earnings expectations have changed from the end of 2021 through the end of January 2026:
The earnings outlook has substantially improved since our Fall 2025 snapshot. Earnings for the final quarter of 2025 are still being reported, but the S&P 500's trailing year earnings per share rose from $244.51 to $246.47 per share. Looking further forward, the index' forecast trailing year earnings per share through the end of 2026 saw robust improvements, rising from $281.78 to $294.00 as the outlook for earnings improved.
It's quite an impressive earnings outlook to go out on. Howard Silverblatt picked his exit date well!
At this writing, we don't know S&P's plans regarding whether it will continue publishing this data series or others that Howard maintained, such as S&P's monthly Divstat data that continued a long tradition of publishing the U.S. stock market's dividend metadata that extends back to January 1929, when a young firm then known as Standard Statistics began the practice and made it available to the Associated Press! We hope they do, because that's a big part of what made the firm that became Standard & Poor a trusted source of information conveying how the stock market is performing over the years.
For the last 49 years of its history, Howard Silverblatt tracked and presented the market data that sustained that hard-earned trust. He's left behind some very big shoes to fill.
Reference
Silverblatt, Howard. Standard & Poor. S&P 500 Earnings and Estimates. [Excel Spreadsheet]. 31 January 2026. Accessed 13 February 2026. Over the years, this spreadsheet captured a lot of Howard's personality, occasionally featuring photos or other observations that made it stand apart from the dry presentation of financial data that's common in the finance industry.
Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A crystal ball with the word 'SP 500' written inside it". And 'Earnings' written above it, which we added.
Labels: earnings, forecasting, SP 500
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