Earning Surprises

A healthy box office performance from James Bond, combined with the fruits of its Latin American expansion, may produce a positive earnings surprise at Cinemark Holdings (CNK.N). The Oscar nominations are out, and the Golden Globe awards have been handed out, while audiences flock to movie theaters to catch not only the award-winners and nominees [...]

While Bank of America’s costly settlement delivered a blow to forecast earnings growth rates for the fourth quarter, the rate at which the first companies to report are delivering positive surprises is off to a healthy start. The fourth-quarter earnings season kicked off on a positive note last week, with companies beating estimates for both [...]

DirecTV’s preference for a stable base of premium subscribers willing to pay up for access to the sports programming to which they have become addicted is translating into robust cash flow from operations, and creating the prospect of a healthy positive earnings surprise for the fourth quarter. DirecTV (DTV.O) plans to boost the cost of [...]

Adopting the philosophy “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, Avis Budget Group (CAR.N) announced plans to acquire Zipcar (ZIP.O) at the beginning of the 2013, but the purchase will just take its debt burden up another notch at a time when its earnings from recently-acquired European operations are flagging. Little wonder that the company [...]

Corn prices may remain at relatively high levels, but that doesn’t appear to be stopping Smithfield Farms from preparing to deliver another positive earnings surprise. The pork production industry, along with many other meat processors, took a blow last year as corn and wheat prices skyrocketed during the summer’s devastating drought in the U.S. Midwest. [...]

Spirit Airlines may have sent it earnings soaring by charting everything from $5 for a boarding pass to $35 for the right to put your bag in an overhead compartment, but analysts are warning of turbulence ahead. In spirit, at least, Spirit Airlines (SAVE.O) is North America’s answer to Ryanair (RYAAY.O), an ultra low-cost carrier [...]

An influx of new supplies of oil from the Bakken shale formation and other similar plays has created a pool of ‘trapped’ crude oil that is helping refiners like HollyFrontier Corp. (HFC.N) by pushing down feedstock prices while enabling them to sell their own products at higher global prices. The boom in shale oil production [...]

The death of the personal computer may not be imminent, but the preference of consumers for tablets is taking a particularly heavy toll on AMD’s profits, which now is expected to report even larger losses than anticipated. For the last few decades, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., better known as AMD, has been Intel’s key rival [...]

StarMine models accurately predicted the direction of third-quarter earnings surprises for 80% of its selections. As always, toward the end of the third quarter, the StarMine research team at Thomson Reuters sat down to peruse corporate earnings forecasts in search of companies that it believes are most likely to report a big surprise (either positive [...]

Many of the earnings trends for 2012 are likely to remain in place in 2013, raising the prospect of a new year full of slow earnings growth. On the eve of 2013, logic suggests taking a look back at the old year – 2012 – to revisit some of its major corporate earnings trends and [...]