Stock Market Live October 28: Earnings Keep Driving S&P 500 (VOO) Higher
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Powerful earnings reports from giant S&P 500 companies are pulling the S&P 500 ETF higher.
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Many of the country’s biggest tech and AI companies will report over the next two days.
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Earnings season is in full swing, and so far, Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (NYSEMKT: VOO) investors largely seem to like what they’re hearing, and the Voo is up a modest 0.2% so far.
Cruise company Royal Caribbean (NYSE: RCL) beat earnings by six cents last night, reporting a huge $5.75 per share profit despite sales coming in just a bit light at $5.1 billion.
It’s a bit concerning that Royal Caribbean said earnings for the full year will fall short of expectations, however, with a forecast between $15.58 and $15.63 per share, and this forecast is costing the stock 8% in early trading.
S&P 500 component company and health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) did substantially better, beating earnings by 11 cents this morning, and reporting $2.92 per share in Q3 profit on $113.2 billion in revenue, which was also ahead of estimates.
UnitedHealth stock is up about 1% in response.
Another S&P 500 component company, UPS (NYSE: UPS) did even better, beating by 44 cents with a profit of $1.74 per share in Q3. Revenue was $560 million more than expected at $21.4 billion, and UPS forecast even better revenue in Q4 — $24 billion — sending the stock up more than 11%.
Rounding out the alphabet, tech company Zebra Technologies (Nasdaq: ZBRA) — also an S&P 500 component — said it beat earnings by 15 cents, earning $3.88. Revenue only scraped by the forecast at $1.3 billion, but Zebra also said its Q4 earnings will be better than Wall Street is calling for, landing somewhere between $4.20 and $4.40 per share.
Zebra stock is nonetheless down more than 7% already today.
Earnings to come
Magnificent Seven companies Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG), Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Meta (Nasdaq: META), and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are all expected to report over the next couple of days.
Whether the market can keep powering higher will depend largely on how those names fare.