The End Of A Very Good Q4 Earnings Season

With Wal-Mart reporting results today, the 4th quarter earnings reporting season has unofficially ended. And what a season it was, with a likely gain of more than 8% for the S&P 500 (measured from the unofficial start of earnings season about a week into the New Year and lasting through today).

This would mark the best Q4 reporting season in more than 20 years. The table below shows every time the S&P 500 rallied at least 5% during this time span since 1950, and we can see that the shorter-term returns were consistently poor. Over the long-term, though, returns were good, and consistently so.