text: Earnings Guidance Remains Weak - February 20, 2014 - Zacks.com
  WMT	VZ	DE	BAC	BA
  The following is an excerpt from this week's Earnings Trends article. To see the full report, please click here.
  The most notable thing that hasn't changed at all from other recent quarters is guidance – it was weak before and it's still weak, as the guidance from Wal-Mart (WMT - Free Report)	, Whole Foods (WFM), Deere & Company (DE - Free Report)	, and Boeing (BA - Free Report)	, just to name a few, shows. Part of the guidance weakness is likely a function of management's need for expectations management. The need for conservatism aside, one has to be extremely cynical to believe that management teams would guide lower while knowing that their business outlook was stable, if not improving. The chart below shows how estimates for the current quarter have fallen in response to weak company guidance.
  The +10.4% 'headline' total earnings growth rate definitely looks fairly robust, particularly when compared to the growth rate for this same group of 430 companies in the last few quarters. Easy comparisons for three companies – Bank of America (BAC - Free Report)	, Verizon (VZ - Free Report)	, and Travelers (TRV) – account for a big part of the strong Q4 earnings growth. Exclude these three and total earnings growth for the S&P 500 companies that have reported drops by almost half. Performance on the revenue front is notably sub-par relative to recent quarters, dragged down by weakness in the Finance and Energy sectors.