Earnings Season: 2022 Calendar & What To Look For (2024)

2022 U.S. Earnings Season Calendar

Earnings season generally takes place in the months of January, April, July, and October, which are the months that follow most companies' fiscal quarters. Financial results are typically released after the stock market closes on Thursdays and Fridays during earnings season.

While there are rules regarding deadlines by which the earnings report needs to be filed and reported on, businesses can schedule the release on a day that benefits them. For example, some companies might take the full 30 days after the end of the quarter to have their accounting finished and report their earnings while others might report within 15 days.

What Is Financial Earnings Season?

Financial earnings season is a time of year when public companies release their financial reports. These financial reports include information about the company's earnings, revenue, and expenses. It gives the general public, including investors, access to actual company performance from the previous three months. This can greatly sway what investors decide to do with the company's stock, which will impact the overall stock price.

What Should an Investor Look for in Financial Earnings Season?

When looking at financial earnings, investors can look at a number of performance metrics from revenue to cash flow. One that shouldn't be overlooked is the company's earnings per share (EPS). EPS is a measure of how much profit a company made per share of stock. The higher the EPS, the better.

The investor should also look at the company's revenue and expenses. If a company is increasing its spending faster than its revenue, investors should know why. Sometimes this is due to poor performance and sometimes it's due to an increased investment in growth. Even with poor performance, investors may want to hold the stock for a longer-term investment, expecting the stock to bounce back in later quarters.

What's Included in an Earnings Report?

A company's net income, revenue, and earnings per share as the major things on their earnings report that investors typically won't find elsewhere. Each of these three things is important to look at for investors because each plays a different role in showing off the potential financial strength or weaknesses of the business's current and projected performance.

1. Net income is important because it is the difference between the money the company brings in through sales and other revenue streams, and the money it spends on expenses like salaries, rent, and materials. If a company's net income is positive, that means it made money during the quarter and is in good financial health. Net income is a metric highly dependent on accounting measures. It's easier to manipulate than a metric like free cash flow.
2. The company's revenue is the total amount of money that the company brought in during the quarter in sales, and it can give investors a good idea of how well the company is doing overall. Investors will find that with some high-growth companies, revenue is more important than net income because it can take a while to become profitable.
3. The company's expenses include everything from salaries and rent to materials and marketing costs. By looking at a company's expenses, investors can get a better sense of how much it's spending to keep its business running. This could raise some red flags for businesses that are spending frivolously.

What Earnings Season Means to Investors

For investors, earnings season is an important time to stay up to date on the financial health of major companies. These reports can have a big impact on stock prices, so it's crucial to understand what's included in them and what they mean for investors.

Strategies for Profiting From Insights

There are different strategies to look at when determining what to do with the information investors learn from the insights found by scrubbing these reports.

• Trade Stocks According to Performance: One strategy from the insights gleaned from earnings reports is to trade stocks accordingly. If a company releases positive earnings results, its stock price is likely to go up. If a company releases negative earnings results, its stock price is likely to go down. However, it's very difficult to profit off this information once it becomes public as the market moves very quickly, often too much so for individual investors to react accordingly.

• Make Long-Term Investment Decisions: Another strategy for profiting from earnings reports is to use the information to inform any investment decisions. If an investor is bullish on a stock for the long haul then when that business releases a weak earnings report it could be time to buy more.

• Do Nothing (or Hold): A lot of investors have a knee-jerk reaction to these reports when the right strategy might be to just hold. Many businesses, depending on the industry, stabilize with time, and dumping the stock right after a bad quarter could cost an investor money in the end.

• Invest in the Industry: Another strategy is to invest in lesser-known stocks of the same industry where other businesses are having great quarters. This could be a sign that the industry is on the rise and an investor could benefit from the next wave of successful stocks.

  See Also

  What is a fiscal quarter?

• Play the Odds: Some investors will make buying or selling decisions before earnings season. This means that they will play the odds to determine whether the earnings report is going to come out good or bad for the company and decide to buy or sell stocks accordingly.

Regardless of what an investor decides, being able to act from the information received is important. Thinking through the overall investment strategy before these calls is important to an investor's overall success in acting on these reports.

Bottom Line

The financial earnings season provides insights into the financial health of major companies and how they are performing, which is important information to consider when making investment decisions. Keep up-to-date with financial news reports during the U.S. earnings season by following major events like Amazon's financial results or Apple's quarterly report on the financial calendar. Dates that companies release earnings can be found here.

Also, it's important to take the time to understand what's included in an earnings report and what it means for investors so that the financial rewards of this crucial financial event can benefit the overall investment strategy.

Jeff White