“Earnings season is fast being forgotten” amid “cascading fear” of the coronavirus, write Elena Popina and Lu Wang for Bloomberg. Investors would usually spend the end of January scouring the latest quarterly earnings reports. Instead the market is “ruled by anxiety”. Even “surprisingly strong earnings” from market stalwarts Apple and Amazon have failed to cheer people up.
It is worth keeping an eye on US corporate earnings all the same. As Maggie Fitzgerald notes on CNBC, at over 200%, “the size of the stockmarket relative to the size of the economy is at an all-time high”. On another measure, the cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio, US stock have not been this expensive since the 2000 dotcom bubble.
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