The mega-cap stocks that dominate the US markets are just wrapping up a truly-extraordinary earnings season. Naturally this first quarter under Republicans' new corporate tax cuts fueled surging profits. But sales were up big too, which is no mean feat for massive companies. With sustained growth at this torrid pace impossible, peak-earnings fears are mounting. And valuations stayed extremely expensive exiting Q1.
Four times a year publicly-traded companies release treasure troves of valuable information in the form of quarterly reports. Required by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, these 10-Qs contain the best fundamental data available to investors and speculators. They dispel all the sentimental distortions inevitably surrounding prevailing stock-price levels, revealing the underlying hard fundamental realities.
The deadline for filing 10-Qs for “large accelerated filers” is 40 days after fiscal quarter-ends. The SEC defines this as companies with market capitalizations over $700m. That currently includes every single stock in the flagship S&P 500 stock index, which includes the biggest and best American companies. As Q1'18 ended, the smallest SPX stock had a market cap of $2.1b which was 1/410th the size of leader apple.
The middle of this week marked 39 days since the end of calendar Q1, so almost all of the big US stocks of the S&P 500 have reported. The exceptions are companies running fiscal quarters out of sync with calendar quarters. walmart, Home Depot, and Cisco have fiscal quarters ending in April instead of the usual March, so their “Q1” results weren't out yet as of this Wednesday. They'll arrive in the coming weeks.
The S&P 500 (SPX) is the world's most-important stock index by far, weighting the best US companies by market capitalization. So not surprisingly the world's largest and most-important ETF is the SPY SPDR S&P 500 ETF which tracks the SPX. This week it had net assets of a staggering $256.7b! The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF and Vanguard S&P 500 ETF also track the SPX with $149.9b and $88.5b of net assets.
The vast majority of investors own the big US stocks of the SPX, as they are the top holdings of nearly all investment funds. So if you are in the US markets at all, including with retirement capital, the fortunes of the big US stocks are very important for your overall wealth. Thus once a quarter after earnings season it's essential to check in to see how they are faring fundamentally. Their results also portend stock-price trends.
Unfortunately my small financial-research company lacks the manpower to analyze all 500 SPX stocks in SPY each quarter. Support our business with enough newsletter subscriptions, and I would gladly hire the people necessary to do it. For now we're digging into the top 34 SPX/SPY components ranked by market capitalization. That's an arbitrary number that fits neatly into the tables below, but a commanding sample.
As of the end of Q1'18 on March 29th, these 34 companies accounted for a staggering 41.7% of the total weighting in SPY and the SPX itself! These are the mightiest of American companies, the widely-held mega-cap stocks everyone knows and loves. For comparison, it took the bottom 426 SPX companies to match its top 34 stocks' weighting. The entire stock markets greatly depend on how the big US stocks are doing.
Every quarter I wade through the 10-Q SEC filings of these top SPX companies for a ton of fundamental data I dump into a spreadsheet for analysis. The highlights make it into these tables below. They start with each company's symbol, weighting in the SPX and SPY, and market cap as of the final trading day of Q1'18. That's followed by the year-over-year change in each company's market capitalization, a critical metric.
Major US corporations have been engaged in a wildly-unprecedented stock-buyback binge ever since the Fed forced interest rates to deep artificial lows during 2008's stock panic. Thus the appreciation in their share prices also reflects shrinking shares outstanding. Looking at market-cap changes instead of just underlying share-price changes effectively normalizes out stock buybacks, offering purer views of value.
That's followed by quarterly sales along with their YoY changes. Top-line revenues are one of the best indicators of businesses' health. While profits can be easily manipulated quarter-to-quarter by playing with all kinds of accounting estimates, sales are tougher to artificially inflate. Ultimately sales growth is necessary for companies to expand, as bottom-line earnings growth driven by cost-cutting is inherently limited.
Operating cash flows are also important, showing how much capital companies' businesses are actually generating. Using cash to make more cash is a core tenet of capitalism. While most of these elite US companies reported Q1'18 OCFs as they should, some obscured quarterly results by lumping them in with the past 6 or 9 months. So these tables only include Q1 operating cash flows if specifically reported.
Next are the actual hard quarterly earnings that must be reported to the SEC under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Late in bull markets, companies tend to use fake pro-forma earnings to downplay real GAAP results. These are derided as EBS earnings, Everything but the Bad Stuff! Companies often arbitrarily ignore certain expenses on a pro-forma basis to artificially boost their profits, which is very misleading.
While we're also collecting the earnings-per-share data Wall Street loves, it's more important to consider total profits. Stock buybacks are executed to manipulate EPS higher, because the shares-outstanding denominator of its calculation shrinks as shares are repurchased. Raw profits are a cleaner measure, again effectively neutralizing the impacts of stock buybacks. They better reflect underlying business performance.
