Skip to main content

Beating Earnings

Please!

Like every guy in the business I follow the business news, and most of the time they get it wrong, still there is rarely any mea culpa. The latest is the "beat" estimates on earnings: Where 58% of the S&P 500 companies beat their Q3/09 earnings estimates. Don't kid yourself that's a load of manure!

A parable may be a useful tool here: Let say that you have a daughter, and as a new years resolution she tells you that last year she got an average of B-. This year she will aim to get a B average (just work with me here). Come June your daughter tells you that the year is difficult that she's didn't do all her homework and that the teachers are more demanding, so she will not get an B, but she will get C- or even a D. She works real hard, and at the end of the September she tells you that she now things she is going to get a D+. At the end of the year her grades arrive and she's got a C-. Granted C- is better than a D+, but its not a B-, and definitely note the B she said she was going to get. I don't want to carry the analogy too far, cus it just gets stupid

In the case of the S&P 500 companies, at the end of the summer (or about 2/3 of the way through their third quarter) they told the market (e.g. the analysts of the previous commentary) they though they were going to get a D+, and they ended up with a C-. Is that good, is that a beat; yes and no, its better than a D, but its not a B or even a B- which is what they thought they would get at the beginning of the year. Moreover, they told the market almost at the end of the quarter that they would achive a D and then a few weeks later they get a C- and everybody gets excited.

Go figure

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more