Published November 16th, 2017
This is a guest contribution from Benzinga. This article does not reflect the views of Sure Dividend.
Four times per year Wall Street turns its attention to quarterly earnings reports, where companies disclose how they performed last quarter. They also often use this time to offer projections for the current quarter and fiscal year.
And while these numbers—specifically Earnings Per Share (EPS) and revenue—are critically important in every sector, there are a number of metrics that can be more market-moving in some specific industries. Here are three you should know:
Auto Sales
Each month the major auto manufacturers—General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) in particular—report their auto sales number for the previous month. This number is important because, well, they’re car companies. And they need to sell cars to stay in business.
You can see what that that number looks like in the red headlines below.
Comps/Same-Store-Sales
For the restaurant industry, same-store-sales (also known as comparable sales, or comps) is a measure of the year-over-year difference in restaurant sales. This number is measured on a quarterly and fiscal year basis, and tell us how business has changed year over year.
In the image below you can see how Chipotle (CMG) reported during its Q3 2017 earnings report that comps were up 1% for the quarter. They also project comps for the entire fiscal year to be up 6.5%. Both of these headlines were viewed positively by investors.
Monthly Active Users (MAUs)
In the social media industry, MAUs are often more important than EPS or sales. This is because a lot of social media or tech companies are young, and not yet profitable. But MAUs measure the amount of people who were active on the platform at any point in the last month
Social media companies need to keep growing in order to stay in favor. So the exact number of MAUs may not matter as much as how much it’s changed quarter-over-quarter.
In the image below you can see Twitter’s MAUs for Q3 2017. Twitter has historically had trouble growing its user base, at least to Wall Street’s expectations.
Screenshots and information in this article was retrieved from Benzinga Pro.
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