Earnings Surprise History

How often S&P 500 companies beat, meet or miss the Street's EPS estimate, by sector and over time, and whether a beat (or a miss) tends to repeat next quarter.
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Latest Quarter Beat Rate
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Share of reporters beating consensus EPS
Avg. Surprise Magnitude
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Mean surprise %, latest quarter
Beat Rate After a Beat
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vs. unconditional beat rate
Coverage
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S&P 500 constituents with usable earnings data

Beat rate over time

Share of the mapped universe beating consensus EPS in each calendarized reporting quarter, market-wide.

By sector, latest quarter

Beat rate: share of sector constituents beating consensus EPS.

Surprise magnitude distribution

Latest quarter, all reporters with usable estimates. A longer right tail than left reflects the well-documented tendency for upside surprises to run larger than downside ones.

Does a beat predict another beat?

Pooled across the panel: how often the next quarter is also a beat, depending on whether this quarter was a beat or a miss.
Beat rate after a beat
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Beat rate after a miss
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Unconditional beat rate
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Longest active beat streaks

TickerCompanySectorStreakLatest surprise
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Longest active miss streaks

TickerCompanySectorStreakLatest surprise
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Biggest beats, latest quarter

TickerCompanySectorReportedEst.Surprise
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Biggest misses, latest quarter

TickerCompanySectorReportedEst.Surprise
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Methodology

Each quarter, an S&P 500 company either beats, meets or misses the consensus analyst EPS estimate. The gap between reported and estimated EPS, as a percentage of the estimate, is the surprise. This page pulls Alpha Vantage's quarterly earnings history for every S&P 500 company (sector and name come from Sector Beeswarm) and works out three things: how often companies beat, by how much, and whether beating (or missing) tends to repeat.

Filters. Two filters apply before a quarter counts. A quarter with a consensus estimate under 5¢ is dropped, because dividing by a number that close to zero turns a penny of upside into a triple-digit "surprise." Any surprise beyond ±200% is also dropped, for the same reason. This keeps a few near-zero-EPS names from dominating a mean or leaderboard meant to describe the other 490-odd companies.

Calendarized quarters. A fiscal period ending in a given three-month calendar window (Jan–Mar, Apr–Jun, Jul–Sep, Oct–Dec) is grouped together, so a September-year-end company like Apple lines up with a December-year-end peer reporting a similar period. It's an approximation. The "latest quarter" for the headline stats, sector breakdown and biggest-beat/miss tables is the most recent calendarized quarter where at least half the mapped universe has reported, because early in a reporting season the first few dozen reporters aren't representative.

Persistence. The test pools every consecutive pair of a company's own filtered quarters across the whole panel and asks: given this quarter was a beat, was the next one also a beat? How does that compare with the same question after a miss, and with the overall beat rate? The z-statistic and p-value test whether the after-a-beat and after-a-miss rates differ by more than sampling noise. It's a standard two-proportion z-test, not a claim about causation or a trading signal, and it says nothing about price reaction. That would need a price series around each report date, which this page doesn't include.

Recomputed weekly (Saturday) across all ~500 constituents. There's no page history to accumulate, because Alpha Vantage's EARNINGS endpoint returns years of quarterly history in one call. The trend chart is historical data recomputed each run.

Source: Alpha Vantage: EARNINGS. Not investment advice.