S&P 500 and Wall Street: The winners and losers in the US stock market

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New York Stock Exchange:

After Corona 2020, vaccines and new democratic leadership give US companies hope for recovery

Photo: Mike Segar / Reuters

In cooperation with "The Economist".

Harbingers of boom

America Inc has survived the oddest year in modern times.

What next?

Stock markets are pricing in an economic snap-back and growth on top of it.

That may be too rosy

Before the covid-19 pandemic investors favored companies with strong sales growth, low debt and high return on assets.

In the past three months, they have been plowing money into smaller, underperforming firms that have barely survived the coronavirus recession.

A robust economic recovery, Wall Street seems to think, will pull the most covid-impaired away from the abyss and towards financial outperformance.

Right now, says Jonathan Golub of Credit Suisse, an investment bank, "the market is rewarding failure."

The bet on weaklings is the latest sign, if more were needed, that 2020 marked a weird year in corporate history.

Far from imploding, as many feared after the virus clobbered stockmarkets in March, America Inc is looking astonishingly healthy.

It did not take long for analysts to start revising their profit forecasts back up (see chart 1).

Even then, four in five big firms that have reported their latest quarterly results beat projections.

Their aggregate earnings exceeded estimates by nearly 17%.

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