THE WEEK AHEAD

Turning company outlooks into the big picture

Amid all the talk of tariffs, interest rate cuts and geopolitical tensions swirling around the stock market, it’s easy to forget this investment fundamental: Buying a stock is a bet on a company’s future profit potential. In the week ahead, investors will be reminded of that as secondquarter earnings season gets underway.

It starts with big banks. Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America will release their second-quarter results by the middle of the week. The financial sector is expected to be one of the industries to show profit growth in the quarter.

There is no shortage of corporate calls during the week giving investors the chance to discern the direction of the overall economy. For instance, JB Hunt, CSX and Prologis can reflect the state of the economy through their shipping business thanks to their trucking, railroad and supply chain work. That trio is among the dozens of companies scheduled to release their quarterly results this week. The world’s largest publicly traded company also is on that list: Microsoft.

Headlines about the stock market may be filled with speculation about the Federal Reserve possibly cutting its short-term interest rate later this month and another round of trade talks between the U.S. and China, but it’s the outlooks that should be the dominant factor in investors’ decisions to buy, hold or sell.

Tom Hudson, Miami Herald