Every three months, we take a snapshot of the expectations for future earnings in the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) at approximately the midpoint of the current quarter, shortly after most U.S. firms have announced their previous quarter's earnings.
The earnings outlook for the S&P 500 has dramatically decayed since our Winter 2020 snapshot, based on the data available as of May 21, 2020, trailing-year earnings for all quarters in 2020 have plummeted from their previous projections just before the onset of the Coronavirus Recession.
We had been planning to reset the horizontal axis