After a mid-month downdraft in markets, results from the Q3 reporting slate drove stocks higher for the month overall. S&P 500 Q3 EPS growth is tracking at 8% year-over-year (“YoY”) versus consensus expectations of 6% at the start of earnings season. While positive, the outperformance of S&P 500 EPS growth relative to expectations is at the lowest level over the past four quarters. This fact strikes us as notable, given that consensus expects S&P 500 EPS YoY growth to almost double by Q3 2026 to ~15%. Since the start of the earnings season, the consensus estimate for 2026 EPS has been revised higher by 2% and now sits at ~$308, resulting in a 2026 P/E of 21.9x.
Optimistic that growth will remain decent and multiple rate cuts are still to come, equity markets posted strong results for September 2025. As can be seen in the graph below, estimates for both GDP growth (white line) and inflation (yellow line) in the U.S. have been steadily inching higher. Just as tariff-related inflation, actual or assumed, doesn’t seem to matter to markets, neither do the facts that AI-driven capex and spending by the top decile of the population account for almost all economic growth. As the market dynamo Prince once sang, markets just want to “party like it’s 1999”!
In August, equities once again followed the rule of ‘don’t fight the Fed’. Ahead of Chair Powell’s Jackson Hole speech on August 22nd, markets, not the Fed, were pricing in multiple rate cuts. That optimism for easier policy, despite a still resilient economy, drove cyclical stocks to outperform defensives (white line) relative to the expected December 2026 Fed Funds rate (red line).
Please remind me what DeepSeek was all about. Wasn’t it supposed to upend the proverbial apple cart and cause the hyperscalers to take a hatchet to their forward capital spending programs? That was January 2025, while the far-right side of the bar graph below displays the capital spending in billions of US$ of the hyperscalers for the recently reported quarter. AI-driven capital spending has returned with a vengeance as Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet spent $155B during the first half of 2025. According to Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, this sum is greater than what the U.S. government has spent on education, training, employment and social services fiscal year-to-date.