Bloomberg Surveillance · Thursday, September 3, 2026
Scott Cronin from Citi highlights that consensus earnings expectations have significantly improved, but a large asterisk is the asset write-ups by media companies in Q1 and Q2. He warns that as the year progresses, the focus will shift to 2027, where growth is expected to decelerate materially, making future projections challenging.
“Beginning of the year, consensus earnings for the index this year was about 312. We're currently standing at 363. This is phenomenal in terms of the improvement in consensus expectations. There's a big asterisk we got to put on this, though, and that's the write-up of assets that so many of these media companies have passed through in the Q1 and even more so in the Q2 reporting period. So a lot of the earnings growth has come from what we'd say non-operating items. And what that means is that they're very hard to project out into 2027. So the way this is going to set up As we get closer to the end of the year, we're going to forget about the write-ups in Q1 and Q2. We're going to look at 27 and say, but wait a minute, the growth is going to decelerate pretty materially from 26.”