The Best Place to Find the Next A-Rated Earnings Winners

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Close Menu Log in Log out My Services Manage Account Support Logout My favorite time of year – earnings season – is officially underway, folks.

Judging by the volatility we’ve seen in the market recently, it came right on time. 

Last week was a painful one for the technology industry. The tech-heavy NASDAQ plunged 4.5% last week, with semiconductor stocks leading the way down. 

It’s clear that folks remain concerned about how long the AI trade can last. The massive amounts tech companies are spending on AI continue to be a major concern, especially with rising interest rates. And last week’s inflation data did little to ease these concerns…

But make no mistake, it’s shaping up to be another blowout earnings announcement season.

Last week was dominated by the big banks. Bank of America Corp. (BAC), BlackRock, Inc. (BLK), Citigroup Inc. (C), Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) all released results.

The reports were mixed. JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America both came up short of analysts’ top- and bottom-line expectations, while Citigroup and Morgan Stanley delivered better-than-expected earnings.

But investors were paying especially close attention to credit quality and loan-loss provisions. Wells Fargo, for example, reported lower loan losses than expected, which suggests consumer credit conditions remain relatively healthy.

Now, longtime readers know I’m generally not a big fan of bank stocks.

Bank earnings can be influenced by things like trading activity, dealmaking and changes in reserves. That makes them harder to evaluate than the companies with strong, straightforward sales and earnings growth that I typically prefer.

So, I’m not suddenly pounding the table on bank stocks. But their results still matter because they can tell us a lot about the health of the consumer and the broader economy.

But this week, things are kicking into high gear. And in today’s Market 360, I want to show you what I’ll be watching as several more market-moving companies prepare to report. Then, we’ll look at what thousands of investors are searching for in my Stock Grader AI tool and how you can use those same tools to hunt for the next earnings-season winners.

Finally, I’ll show you how I’m taking that research one step further as I search for stocks attracting big institutional money.

Our friends at FactSet currently estimate that the S&P 500 will achieve average earnings growth of 29.6% in the third quarter.

But analysts have continued to revise their earnings estimates higher.

As longtime readers know, positive analyst revisions often precede positive earnings surprises. So, I believe wave after wave of better-than-expected results could eventually push average S&P 500 earnings growth north of 33%.

And we’re about to get several important tests this week.

Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) and SpaceX (SPCX) are scheduled to report today. Then Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) and Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) are on tap Wednesday.

Those four reports should give us insight into several of the market’s biggest themes, including artificial intelligence spending, digital advertising, autonomous driving and the enormous infrastructure investments taking place in space and on Earth.

I’m also keeping a close eye on the data-storage side of the AI boom.

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) is scheduled to announce its results on Thursday. Seagate Technology Holdings plc (STX) follows next week, on Oct. 27. Both companies have benefited from booming demand for data storage as AI workloads create an ever-growing need to store and process information.

And that brings me to something interesting my team found when we looked at the latest Stock Grader AI searches.

Stock Grader AI is a new feature built on top of my Stock Grader system.

Stock Grader analyzes more than 6,000 stocks based on the factors I care about most and assigns each stock a letter grade from A to F (Very Strong to Very Weak).

Stock Grader AI adds another layer. Instead of simply looking up one company at a time, you can ask questions in plain English and screen groups of stocks by sector, industry, market capitalization and other characteristics.

And thousands of investors are doing exactly that.

Once again, the most popular type of search was for A-rated stocks within particular sectors and industries.

But take a look at the five most-searched individual stocks:

Memory. AI chips. Data centers. Power infrastructure.

In other words, investors are zeroing in on many of the same areas where corporate earnings are telling us growth remains strongest. Here’s what Stock Grader AI turned up by searching for “A-rated tech stocks”…

Of course, some of the names on this list aren’t exactly secrets. Millions of investors already know about them, Wall Street analysts cover them extensively – and every major financial network discusses them.

But there are a few that aren’t. And that’s why this tool is so handy.

It just goes to show that simply knowing where the growth is happening isn’t enough.

The real opportunity is finding the strong companies in those same booming industries before they become the stocks everybody is talking about.

Here’s another part of the Stock Grader AI report that caught my eye.

The second-most-popular type of search last week was for A-rated small-cap stocks, with 229 searches.

Investors were asking for things like “A-rated small-cap stocks” and smaller companies with A grades across several of my grading measures.

That’s smart. Smaller companies can sometimes benefit tremendously when a powerful investment trend accelerates.

And Stock Grader AI gives you an easy way to start looking.

Or narrow things further by searching for A-rated stocks within an industry benefiting from the AI buildout.

Some investors are getting even more specific.

For example, users searched for companies with strong Earnings Revisions and Earnings Momentum.

That’s especially useful during earnings season.

After all, I don’t simply want a company that belongs to a hot industry. I want companies where sales and earnings are growing, analysts are raising expectations and institutional investors have a reason to keep buying.

That can help us move beyond the obvious stocks dominating CNBC and start building a much narrower list of fundamentally superior candidates.

This is where Stock Grader AI becomes particularly useful.

Earnings season gives us fresh information about where corporate profits are growing fastest. Stock Grader helps us determine which individual companies have the fundamental and quantitative strength to take advantage of those trends.

And Stock Grader AI makes it easier to search through those opportunities.

But that’s still only part of my investing process.

After I identify a fundamentally superior candidate, I want to know something else: Are big institutional investors accumulating shares, or are they quietly heading for the exits?

That’s where my Precursor Intelligence, or P.I., research comes in.

Stock Grader helps me identify strong candidates. The P.I. layer lets me dig deeper into the ownership picture and look for signs that institutional money may already be moving.

And with another wave of potentially market-moving earnings reports arriving over the next several weeks, I believe understanding those institutional movements will become even more important.

In my latest presentation, I explain how I’m using P.I. alongside my quantitative research to identify stocks that could be attracting institutional buying before the rest of Wall Street catches on.

Louis Navellier is one of Wall Street’s renowned growth investors. Providing investment advice to tens of thousands of investors for more than three decades, he has earned a reputation as a savvy stock picker and unrivaled portfolio manager.

Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/market360/2026/10/the-best-place-to-find-the-next-a-rated-earnings-winners/.