Measuring the Beat: 57 Stocks Surpassing Earnings Expectations

Academic research has consistently found that corporate earnings surprises cluster around small positive values, rather than large outperformance. In a study published in the Journal of Accounting Research, Lawrence Brown documented that the median earnings surprise shifted over time from slightly negative to meeting or beating analyst estimates by only a small amount, indicating that firms typically exceed consensus by narrow margins rather than delivering outsized surprises. This pattern reflects both analyst forecasting accuracy and the tendency of companies to manage expectations,...