Here's What Hedge Fund Analysts Expect from Accenture's Earnings Report
Accenture ( ACN ),  the world’s largest consulting company by revenue is expected to report its earnings for FQ1 2014 before the market opens on Thursday, December 19. This year Accenture has experienced significant stock growth despite a large setback in June when the company fell way short on analysts’ revenue expectations in their FQ3’13 filing. Year to date Accenture’s stock price is up over 13%.
The information below is derived from data submitted to the Estimize platform by a set of Buy Side and Independent analyst contributors.
The current Wall Street consensus expectation is for ACN to report $1.09 EPS and $7.226B revenue while the current Estimize consensus from 10 Buy Side and Independent contributing analysts is $1.11 EPS and $7.261B revenue. The magnitude of the difference between the Wall Street and Estimize consensus numbers often identifies opportunities to take advantage of expectations that may not have been priced into the market. In this case, we’re seeing a small difference between the Estimize and Wall Street numbers.
Over the past four months the Wall Street consensus trend for EPS has decreased from $1.12 to $1.09 while the revenue expectation has dropped from $7.423B to $7.226B. The Estimize EPS consensus ended where it began at $1.11 and the revenue expectation crept down from $7.266B to $7.262B.
Over the previous 5 quarters for which there is sufficient data, Estimize has been more accurate than Wall Street in forecasting EPS 4 times and more accurate in predicting revenue all 5 times. By tapping into a wider range of contributors including hedge-fund analysts, asset managers, students, and non professionals we have built a data set that is up to 69.5% more accurate than Wall Street, but more importantly it does a better job of representing the market’s true expectations.
Confidence ratings for each user are calculated through algorithms developed by our deep quantitative research which look at correlations between analyst track records and tendencies as they relate to future accuracy. We believe that everyone’s opinion matters, regardless of who they are, where they’re from, or what it says on their business card.
The distribution of estimates published by analysts on Estimize range from $1.05 to $1.19 EPS and $7.193B to $7.390B in revenues. This quarter our contributing analysts are expecting Accenture to beat Wall Street on both EPS and revenue.
We are seeing a larger distribution of estimates compared to previous quarters. The size of the distribution of estimates relative to previous quarters often signals whether or not the market is confident that it has priced in the expected earnings already. A greater distribution signaling the potential for more volatility post earnings, a smaller vice versa.
The analyst with the highest estimate confidence rating this quarter is anmikyoso who projects $1.13 EPS and $7.390 in revenue. This quarter the analyst with the top confidence rating, who is ranked 30th overall among over 3,300 contributing analysts, is expecting more profit per share and more revenue for ACN than both Estimize and Wall Street.
The Estimize analyst community is expecting a strong report tomorrow from Accenture. Over the past 5 quarters for which we have data ACN has only missed the Estimize EPS and revenue consensus 1 time each. Our analysts are predicting that Accenture will continue its year over year growth in tomorrow’s report.
Get access to estimates for Accenture published by your Buy Side and Independent analyst peers, and register to create your own estimates by heading over to Estimize now.
