Chuck Hill Quotations

We still think we are on track to see earnings growth of 23 percent for the quarter.

This really is a bad period in terms of warnings.

Now we'll see if this time it's going to be different.

Now the big question is what the slope of recovery is going to be. I'm a little afraid it will be more modest than most of what the investment community expects.

On the earnings front, there's not much on the positive side. ...The fourth quarter is going to be a disaster.

I would have expected, even without FD, to see more preannouncements this quarter. Things are worse out there.

But this decline is deeper. You could make the case that this is the worst earnings decline since World War II.

But for the following year, they have narrowed the loss and in some cases gone to profitability.

If a company says it's changing its long-term growth rate by 1 percent, that should be bigger news than if it missed its quarterly earnings per share by a penny. But it's not.

I don't think it's going to temper earnings that much. But it isn't going to be a positive, that's for sure.

We think a pretty strong earnings season for the quarter is pretty much cast in stone.

There are obviously signs the economy is slowing but it's not showing up yet in earnings, and probably won't in the third quarter.

It always takes a toll. These are the peak weeks for warnings and it's going to be worse than normal, but we probably need a little of that.

I think it's going to show up in some comments. I think you will get some comments that (earnings) would have been better if it hadn't been for the euro.

I think the Q4 results will be terrible. I think comments going forward will be much more positive than they've been in the past.

I think that Q4 results will be terrible.

I think the analysts will now exclude more stuff than they would have otherwise. If I'm faced with all or none, I'm going to say all. If it's broken out, I'm going to be more reluctant to exclude the indirect costs.

I think we'll see more announcements like these.

I think we'll probably end up somewhere around negative 4 or negative 5 percent. Some will probably beat expectations, but not many. Down earnings is definitely in the cards, and the prospects of maybe even down earnings further in the fourth quarter.

I think they'll (the Fed) move at the meeting but I think the market is grasping at any straws you can twist into an optimistic story.

I think there'll be more pain and suffering.

Last year, 43 percent of the negative pre-announcements came after Jan. 1, so there will be a ton more.

Overall, the quarter is going to be excellent. We think it will match the 23.6 percent earnings growth for the first quarter, which was the highest we'd seen since back in the fourth quarter of 1993. It's going to be a very good quarter for earnings despite all the pessimism here during the peak time of pre-announcements. But pre-announcements are running a little bit less negative than they usually do so I think it's a bit of an over-reaction.

We have to see how far downward revisions go. You better fasten your seat belt as we go through that...What's been going on, is there was a sort of misplaced euphoria.

We really thought growth would taper off heading into 2000 and it hasn't. It isn't going to be earnings that prick the stock market bubble.

Well, it's still the beginning of the so-called confession season, but it is a little disturbing in that we're running somewhat higher than the normal number of pre-announcements that we would expect this early. And we're running a little bit more negative than we normally do at this early stage.

You are going to have extremely good results.

Utilities are pretty much business as usual. In the aggregate, we see the numbers bounce around some, but this will change. We're still looking at better-than-normal performance.

We'll probably get somewhat of an overreaction to the pre-announcements but that will be good because it brings people back to reality.

We know the market always gets excited when we beat the numbers.

We forecast technology as a whole for 11 percent growth as of Jan. 2. As of March 20, it's at minus 7 percent.

We still are going to suffer. We are well on our way to a record quarter in terms of negative preannouncements.

The critical question isn't are we having a lot of negative pre-announcements, but are we having more or less than normal.

We built too many fiber-optic lines to nowhere. It will take some time to absorb that.

The rebound in the technology shares since September 21 has been huge. I think the valuations are too high again. I don't think people learned their lessons with the correction we had.

The good news is that the recovery's in sight. The bad news is that there's a lot of uncertainty about what the slope of the recovery's going to look like and worries that it'll be somewhat disappointing.

We got a lot of companies this week, but it wasn't a good cross-section of industries. Next week is a much better cross-section. But so far, so good.

We expect the numbers to be somewhere lower by the week of April 13, when all the (quarterly earnings) announcements will have been made.

We certainly think it will end up in negative territory. I think you've got to be looking at 2002 for any recovery.

We're doing about what we expected. Going into the reporting season, the estimate were for a decline of 18 percent and we said we thought we'd end up about down 15 but may end up down 16.

Every quarter, people get all upset when the pre-announcement season is on and it always has a negative bias. I don't think there is anything to be alarmed about.

Earnings are bottoming out and will almost certainly turn up in the next quarter.

The story on slowing earnings growth and revenue growth is not over.

Quarterly earnings are still made up to be too important, in my judgment. There's too much focus on the short term by far.

Of the 59 percent of the S&P 500 that has reported, earnings are down 18.1 percent. If we add that number to estimates for the rest, we're down 22.2 percent from last year.

Any deviation from that 15 percent for the quarter is expected to be lower, not higher.

The big thing hanging over the market is what kind of growth we're going to see in the second half of the year.

There were no great surprises and the biggest concern is the guidance going forward. We still think it's going to be a difficult time ? we're already down 8.3 percent for the third quarter.

There was way too much stenography going on.

There's big changes taking place. By the time we get to the third quarter, most of these companies are going to be significantly in the black, as far as earnings growth goes. And in the fourth quarter, the earnings gains are going to be huge.

At least for the next month or two, the earnings picture is going to be pretty dismal.

As usual, the analysts are looking through rose-colored glasses.

It puts you in a precarious spot where you have to worry about further losses pushing you into situation where you wouldn't meet the debt covenants.

It looks like we are going to beat the estimates by less than we normally do. Until we start beating them by more than we used to, there's no silver lining in these reports.

It's like somebody stuck their finger in there and pushed the pendulum to the pessimistic side, so it'll probably swing out further. So the back swing is probably going to have a lot more momentum than it would have had otherwise. The negative is the news is going to be worse in the short-term, but we're probably going to get over it sooner.

It's going to be an exceptionally good quarter.

It's going to be an excellent quarter for earnings. A lot of these companies will have some very easy comparisons over last year, which will help, but stronger growth in the U.S. and overseas is really going to make a difference, as well.

I'm disappointed and I am surprised. I think it would have been useful to have an extraordinary category. Now it's going to be easier to make it sound like all this indirect stuff was a result of the attack.

Intel is doing a good job with the tools they provide investors and analysts. They're not perfect, but they're darn close.

In addition to a slowing of consumer and capital spending, it may be that current PC products are running out of gas. I haven't even thought about upgrading my PC for several years. You used to have to upgrade all the time because you ran out of memory or needed faster processing.

I don't see how this means the individual is going to have access to good research. We don't know what entities are going to be in this group of independents.

These independents don't want to participate in a market to distribute their research to everyone.

The estimates are for earnings to be down 50 percent in the second quarter, 37 percent in the third quarter, and 12 percent in the fourth.

The charge signifies that AOL used its highly inflated stock to purchase hard assets.

The important thing about next week is not the specific companies. By the end of the week we'll have a pretty good cross section of everything but retailing. It's kind of filling in the blanks.

Analysts are still behind the curve. We will continue to see estimates for 2002 being slashed. We haven't seen the levels of over-pessimism and capitulation yet.