Dwindling Number of Earnings Reports Ahead

Corporate America’s quarterly reporting season will slip into a lower gear. Investors, after riding out the corporate sector’s worst earnings slide in more than a decade, see most of that in the rear-view mirror. The mood has turned to cautious optimism about projections for better results ahead.

Among the smattering of earnings scorecards on tap for the week are such marquee names as Web gear titan Cisco Systems Inc. and telecommunications group WorldCom Inc.

“Companies that have any disappointments would have by now warned us,” said Howard Kornblue, a portfolio manager with the $18-billion Pilgrim Inc. “If anything, we always have the potential for positive surprise, which would help the market.”

Nearly 70% of the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index--349 companies--have reported results. Earnings were down 23.7% from the fourth quarter of 2000. This is worse than expectations of a yearly decline of 22.4%, said Joseph Kalinowski, senior equity strategist with market watcher Thomson Financial.

This would make the 2001 fourth quarter the worst since earnings fell 24.2% in the 1991 second quarter, Kalinowski says. Sixty-seven companies in the technology-laden Nasdaq 100 have issued results, with reported earnings down 40.8% from last year, he added.