If History is a Guide, There's Still Another Week Before Earnings Will Start to Move the Stock Market

The S&P 500 climbs 0.14% and 0.05% on average during the first two weeks of earnings season, per Jefferies.

Expectations for earnings season are high - but it will still take another week for earnings to start moving the market, if history is a guide.

After the first week of the second-quarter financial reporting period, the S&P 500 SPX is down 1.5% following a series of results ranging from a number of banks, including JPMorgan $(JPM)$, Bank of America (BAC) and Morgan Stanley $(MS)$, to Netflix $(NFLX)$ and UnitedHealth $(UNH)$.

Not to worry. Positive moves in the stock-market index generally aren't seen until the third, fourth and fifth weeks of earnings season, Andrew Greenebaum, senior vice president of equity research product management at Jefferies, wrote in a note on Saturday.

He put this partially down to the first two weeks of the period tending to correlate with Wall Street two-year projections - which are biased lower. Whereas during the third week of earnings, when the largest technology companies usually report, the S&P 500's outlook for two years ahead climbs by almost 2% on average, Greenebaum said.

Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ and Tesla $(TSLA)$ are set to report results on Wednesday, while Microsoft $(MSFT)$, Meta $(META)$, Apple $(AAPL)$ and Amazon (AMZN) are all scheduled for next week.

Pulling the S&P 500's performance data from 1990 onward, moves tend to be relatively steady during the first two weeks, with average advances of 14 and five basis points, respectively, Jefferies found.

After that initial stage, the index then rallies by around 30 basis points per week between the third and fifth weeks, ending the first month of earnings season higher by over a percentage point on average, Greenebaum wrote.

"Week 5 is filled with the large retailers and off-cycle software, but also tends to see some of the bolus of sector wraps and forward-looking research, serving to boost the average revision for that week as well," he added.

He also analyzed the market action ahead of earnings season.

Greenebaum said for this reporting period, the added 43 basis points measured in the month before JPMorgan posted results was about half the average recorded in the past 36 years.

"Interestingly, when this performance is below average, it has coincided with nearly 2x the earnings season performance for the benchmark (+260bps vs. +130bps) and is positive more frequently," he wrote.

-Nora Redmond

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July 20, 2026 05:18 ET (09:18 GMT)

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