Q3 Earnings Season Kicks Off: Major Banks Thrive While Regional Lenders Signal Trouble

• Better-than-expected results from big banks lifts S&P 500 EPS growth for Q3 2025 to 8.5%

• CEOs appear confident as the earnings season kicks off according to our latest LERI reading

• Potential earnings surprises this week: Chubb Limited, Capital One, CenterPoint Energy, Intuitive Surgical, and Procter & Gamble

• Peak weeks for the Q3 season run from October 27 - November 14

The third-quarter earnings season for the nation's largest banks commenced last week, revealing a largely positive picture of the financial health of the sector. So far, major players including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have reported results that have generally surpassed analyst expectations, driven by a resilient economy, a rebound in investment banking, and strong performances in their wealth management divisions. Even consumer spending, a worrisome area for banks, came in better-than-anticipated, but that could be up-in-the-air going forward as many of these banks also increased their provisions for credit losses.¹

But perhaps the most cautious signal came from JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon, who openly discussed the ongoing challenges facing the US economy. "There continues to be a heightened degree of uncertainty stemming from complex geopolitical conditions, tariffs and trade uncertainty, elevated asset prices and the risk of sticky inflation," Dimon said.²

By Thursday those warnings started to ring true as a different segment of financials began to report results. Regional banks such as Zions Bancorp and Western Alliance Bancorp reported results that had investors worried about the health of their loans. Rising concerns about a potential crisis are being fueled by recent problematic loans and two auto industry-related bankruptcies. These events highlight potentially lax lending, especially in the private credit market. Zions recently announced a significant charge due to bad loans, prompting an independent review. Following this, Western Alliance alleged fraud by a borrower, rattling investors despite the company reiterating its guidance and 2025 outlook.³ Zions and Western Alliance both fell 10% on Thursday, and the SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) lost around 4%.

With the addition of those bank reports, the S&P 500 blended EPS growth rate stands at 8.5%. According to FactSet, this would be the ninth consecutive quarter of growth. Revenues are anticipated to grow 6.6% YoY.⁴

CEOs Remain Confident Heading into Q3 Earnings

After rising to its highest level in four years during the last quarter of 2024, the Late Earnings Report Index, our proprietary measure of CEO uncertainty, has now recorded four consecutive quarterly readings below the historical benchmark as companies prepare to report their Q3 results. 

The LERI tracks outlier earnings date changes among publicly traded companies with market capitalizations of $250M and higher. The LERI has a baseline reading of 100, and anything above that indicates that companies are feeling uncertain about their current and short-term prospects. A LERI reading under 100 suggests that companies feel they have a pretty good handle on the near-term.

The official pre-peak season LERI reading for Q3 earnings (reports in Q4) stands at 56, the lowest Q4 LERI ever recorded. This is well below the baseline reading, suggesting when companies announced their earnings dates they were feeling more certain about economic conditions. As of October 15, there were 61 late outliers and 98 early outliers. This is the third quarter in a row that the number of outliers are significantly higher than usual. For Q4 2025 the total is 159 vs. Q4 2024 where there were only 139 outliers, showing that more companies are scheduling earnings dates outside of their typical date range.

Source: Wall Street Horizon

On Deck this Week 

This week 1,221 companies in our universe of over 11,000 global equities are slated to release results for the third quarter. Tech will be in focus with IBM out Wednesday, and Intel on Thursday. We’ll also hear from the first of the Mag 7 reports when Tesla reports on Wednesday. Other names to look out for include Netflix out tomorrow, industrials such as 3M and Honeywell, and consumer facing names such as Hasbro, Mattel, Southwest and Alaska Airlines.

Source: Wall Street Horizon

Outlier Earnings Dates This Week

Academic research shows that when a company confirms a quarterly earnings date that is later than when they have historically reported, it’s typically a sign that the company will share bad news on their upcoming call, while moving a release date earlier suggests the opposite.⁵

This week we get results from a number of large companies on major indexes that have pushed their Q3 2025 earnings dates outside of their historical norms. Five companies within the S&P 500 confirmed outlier earnings dates for this week, three of which are earlier than usual and therefore have positive DateBreaks Factors*. Those names are Chubb Limited (CB), Capital One (COF) and CenterPoint Energy (CNP). The two names with negative DateBreak Factors are Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) and Procter & Gamble (PG).

* Wall Street Horizon DateBreaks Factor: statistical measurement of how an earnings date (confirmed or revised) compares to the reporting company's 5-year trend for the same quarter. Negative means the earnings date is confirmed to be later than historical average while Positive is earlier.

Q3 Earnings Wave

The peak weeks of the Q3 earnings season are expected to fall between October 27 - November 14, with each week expected to see over 2,000 reports. Currently, November 7 is predicted to be the most active day with 1,219 companies anticipated to report. Thus far, only 62% of companies have confirmed their earnings date (out of our universe of 11,000+ global names), so this is subject to change. The remaining dates are estimated based on historical reporting data.

Source: Wall Street Horizon

1 “Here's What We've Learned From Big Bank Earnings Reports This Week,” Investopedia, Lyle Niedens, October 16, 2025, https://www.investopedia.com
2 JPMorgan Chase Q3 2023 Earnings Report, October 14, 2025, https://www.jpmorganchase.com
3 “Regional banks, Jefferies shares tank as concerns about sour loans grow on Wall Street,” CNBC, Alex Harring, Sarah Min, October 16, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com 
4 FactSet Earnings Insight, John Butters, October 17, 2025, https://advantage.factset.com
5 Time Will Tell: Information in the Timing of Scheduled Earnings News, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Eric C. So, Travis L. Johnson, Dec, 2018, https://papers.ssrn.com

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