S&P 500 Delivers Biggest Earnings Beat Since 2021: 3 Magnificent 7 Stocks Did The Heavy Lifting

Wall Street braced for a first-quarter slowdown. Instead, the S&P 500 delivered its strongest profit print in five years.

Yet, three stocks did almost all the lifting.

With 63% of the index reported, blended first-quarter earnings growth for the S&P 500 is tracking at 27.1% year-over-year, more than double the 13.1% pace analysts modeled at quarter-end, according to the latest FactSet’s Earnings Insights.

If that holds, it would mark the highest quarterly growth rate since fourth quarter of 2021 and extend the streak of double-digit profit growth to six consecutive quarters.

The catch is concentration. Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) accounted for 71% of the net dollar-level increase in S&P 500 earnings in the past week alone.

Three Reports That Rewrote The Quarter

The surprises were historic.

Alphabet beat by 90% ($5.11 actual versus $2.68 expected). Amazon beat by 70% ($2.78 versus $1.63). Meta beat by 56% ($10.44 versus $6.67).

Each figure dwarfs the company’s own five-year average surprise rate of 12.4%, 29.3% and 4.3%, respectively.

“The positive EPS surprises reported by all three companies for Q1 exceeded their 5-year averages,” John Butters, senior earnings analyst at FactSet, said.

Communication Services earnings, which house Alphabet and Meta, swung from a projected 3.8% decline on March 31 to 53.2% growth today. Consumer Discretionary, dominated by Amazon, jumped from 1.7% to 39%.

“The blended earnings growth rate for the ‘Magnificent 7’ companies has increased to 61.0% today from
expectations for 22.4% earnings growth on March 31,” Butters added.

The One-Time Items Behind The Beats

Butters flagged that the headline numbers came with sizable non-operating boosts.

Alphabet’s quarter included a $37.7 billion gain on equity securities, primarily unrealized appreciation on private-company stakes.

Amazon’s profit was boosted by $16.8 billion in pre-tax gains from its Anthropic investment.

Meta’s number included an $8.03 billion income tax benefit. Meta itself disclosed that EPS would have been $3.13 lower without that benefit.

Goldman Sachs strategists led by Ben Snider arrived at a similar conclusion.

In a recent note, Snider highlighted that aggregate S&P 500 EPS growth is tracking at 25%, more than twice the consensus estimate of 12% coming into the season. But the strength is overstated by a handful of accounting items.

“While the aggregate S&P 500 EPS growth rate of 25% is distorted by idiosyncratic one-time benefits, earnings growth is tracking at a 16% pace excluding those items, and companies have reported the lowest frequency of EPS misses in 25 years outside of the COVID reopening period,” Snider said.

Snider’s team estimated that median S&P 500 stock earnings growth is tracking at 11%, against an 8% pre-season estimate. Even adjusting for the one-time items, the first quarter is on pace for the strongest quarterly growth rate since 2021.

Why The Reward For Beats Has Been Small

Despite the blowout, stocks beating consensus EPS have outperformed the index by just 20 basis points the day after reporting, one of the slimmest rewards on record per Goldman’s data. Companies that disappointed saw an average two-day drawdown of 4.2%, wider than the 2.9% historical norm.

Snider linked the muted reaction to the macro backdrop.

“The reward for EPS beats has been unusually small, and many consumer firms have yet to report,” Snider said.

Forward estimates are still being lifted, not cut. The second-quarter 2026 bottom-up EPS rose 2.1% in April, the largest first-month-of-quarter increase since the second quarter of 2021, FactSet data show.

Snider’s team flagged confidence in management guidance, writing that despite elevated energy prices and geopolitical uncertainty, corporate guidance and analyst estimate revisions have remained strong so far this quarter.

What Investors Are Watching Next

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), the index’s largest stock, reports on May 20. Consumer retailers — the cohort most exposed to oil-driven margin compression — close out the season.

Together, they will reveal whether Corporate America is actually firing on all cylinders, or whether the headline strength has been carried by accounting items at three or four names.

Originally Posted May 4, 2026 – S&P 500 Delivers Biggest Earnings Beat Since 2021: 3 Magnificent 7 Stocks Did The Heavy Lifting