WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
With fears growing that Europe's economic problems will spread globally, today let's look at earnings expectations by country. We'll look at which countries have profit expectations that are crumbling the quickest.
MORE ABOUT TODAY'S SCREEN
We'll use StarMine again, a Thomson Reuters service that gathers earnings estimate data from analysts. StarMine can help us find earnings-revision momentum, which we'll define here as how much earnings estimates have risen or fallen in the past 30 and 60 days. We're looking at earnings estimate revisions for the current quarter and the next 12 months.
We'll sort by countries that have experienced the biggest drop in earning expectations for the next quarter. We'll accept only mid- and large-capitalization companies in the screen.
WHAT DID WE FIND OUT?
Not surprisingly, some of the biggest culprits for the crisis in Europe are at the top of the list, such as Greece and Ireland (Ireland's results are obviously showing some statistical anomalies likely because of the small sample size of companies). Canada's near-term profit expectations have slipped only slightly.
What's interesting is that the long-term profit expectations are holding up much better than the near-term expectations. Either analysts believe the crisis will pass quickly or they're still trying to get a handle on how extensive the damage to profits will be.