FNArena’s Weekly Insights – February 19 2024
In this week’s Weekly Insights:
More Winners Than Losers In Mid-February
By Rudi Filapek-Vandyck, Editor
Reporting seasons in Australia have become a second half (of the month) tsunami affair and by this time twelve months ago the FNArena Corporate Results Monitor had already covered close to 100 results against 68 only as at Friday.
The week ahead will see circa 40% of the ASX200’s market capitalisation report financials, followed by a long tail of mostly smaller cap peers lined up for the final week.
By the time the dust settles, the Monitor will have made post-result assessments for close to 400 ASX-listed companies.
In brief: a lot can happen between now and the end of the month as far as final judgments are concerned, but there’s no denying the optics are positive thus far, and so too are the early signals and statistics.
The FNArena Monitor has ‘beats’ running above 41% -well above average- and ‘misses’ at 11%, well below average.
To put both numbers in perspective: February last year saw 33% of all companies missing market forecasts with only 29% beating expectations. The numbers for August were much more balanced; 28% ‘misses’ versus 29% ‘beats’.
The heavy skew towards ‘beat’s and ‘meets’ in the first half this time around has unmistakably injected renewed optimism into what already was a risk-on environment led by the prospect of lower interest rates later in the year.
So where does this apparent turnaround in operational dynamics stem from?…..
