SHartwell

Second Quarter Earnings Expectations

Where the information comes from:

Analysts write research reports in which they forecast earnings.

Companies (like Thomson and Reuters) then average these forecasts to get an average expectation for each company.

Companies like Bespoke then add up all the forecasts for companies in a particular sector to get "expected" earnings.

You, too, can see all these forecasts. Go to Yahoo finance, enter a ticker, and then click on "Analyst Estimates" on the left-hand side of the screen.

Lest the analysts be tempted to goose the forecasts for favorite companies, other firms (like StarMine) follow each analysts' estimates over time and rate their accuracy.