This week will be the biggest earnings week of the year as 190 firms are reporting, including Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon. Those three reports will shape the performance of the market for the next few months. If 2 or 3 miss estimates, the rally could be halted, especially in the Nasdaq which has had a great year. Apple reports on August 1st which is next week. That won’t be a critical report as everyone is shifting their attention to the soon to be released new iPhone. In this article, we’ll delve into the latest earnings information that’s available and the future estimates.

According to the S&P Dow Jones numbers, the percentage of firms which have beat earnings estimates has dropped to 72.92% after 19.01% have reported earnings. That’s 4.91% higher than the average beat rate going back to Q2 2013. FactSet posted the chart above in its summary of earnings thus far. It shows that 77% of firms beat sales estimates which is 24% higher than the 5-year average. However, this beat rate hasn’t led to much change in the aggregate numbers as the FactSet sales growth rate improved one tenth of one percent to 5.0%. FactSet blames the lack of a large increase on the weakness from utilities and energy companies.

I went over to the S&P Dow Jones report to get the details on these sectors. It says 72.6% of firms have beat sales estimates. It says only 2 energy companies reported earnings by July 21st and no utility companies had reported yet. The difference between the two reports must be because of the time of day they coordinated the data. S&P Dow Jones says the numbers were as of the morning and FactSet doesn’t say the time of day. Not only do the S&P Dow Jones numbers not corroborate with the FactSet assertion that energy and utilities brought down results, but also FactSet’s own chart shows that energy had the best sales surprise rate. We’ll likely find out the true story of this earnings period when this week’s results are included. Keep in mind, that if energy is beating estimates, that’s only because the bar has been lowered substantially as we will look at next.