Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal had a big headline on page B10, discussing utility stock’s big move last week. The S&P 500 utilities were up about 4% last week, which was the group’s best weekly move since July. The article attributed the rise to falling interest rates, but this is earnings season, and nine of the twenty-eight S&P 500 utilities released results during the period. I thought it would be appropriate to take a look at these names to see if any surprises had an impact on the outperformance.
(Source: Factset)
As you can see from the above table, EIX was the only utility of the group to beat estimates, and it was actually the worst performing name of the companies that released results last week.
Below is the full list of the S&P 500 utilities and their performance for the week. As you can see, all the names were up, with CNP’s 1.9% gain as the smallest rise. The entire S&P 500 was up 0.7% for the week.
(Source: Factset)