Higher promotional activity to help lower inventory would also be a contributing factor to lower earnings.
Perhaps a bit of each of these elements helps to answer this quandary, but there is one overriding factor to the corporate earnings momentum: the lack of wage pressures on businesses.
That's the key factor in our ratings of earnings quality for 28 growth companies.
Finally, Applied slaps a decay factor on each company's earnings that it calculates with variables like firm size and the magnitude of the economic margin.
Overly aggressive consensus earnings expectations add another factor.
Analysts studying companies buying back their own stock will also factor into their analysis that future earnings will now be spread over a smaller share count, thereby increasing the per-share earnings the remaining shares will enjoy, versus what that same number would have been absent the stock buyback activity.
The iPhone remains a growth engine for Apple and the phone's popularity in Asia was a factor behind the company's robust earnings for its most recent quarter.
Europe is still mired in a recession and a debt crisis that tends to flare up every few weeks, while slower growth in countries like China was a big factor in a disappointing third-quarter earnings season.
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But one positive factor is the impressive U.S. corporate earnings data.
And even when you factor this in to your calculations, you still need much more massive earnings growth than the PEG ratio would imply you need, again due to the time value of money.
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It seemed to me that there were just as many earnings beats as earnings misses, so a favorable holiday sales outlook is not a factor in the positive technical divergences.
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