What The Buy Side Expects From Starbucks

 | Apr 24, 2014 02:11AM ET

Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ:SBUX) is set to report FQ2 2014 earnings after the market closes on Thursday, April 24th. Last quarter there was some concern that Starbucks sales might be down because of the weather and lower customer traffic in shopping centers where many Starbucks stores are located. As it turned out Starbucks did come up short on revenue, but also managed to top profit expectations by a small margin. Rumors have been swirling that Starbucks may be about to take a stake in SodaStream (NASDAQ:SODA), the at home carbonated beverage system, to go head to head with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (NASDAQ:GMCR) and their Keurig machine. Here’s what investors expect from Starbucks on Thursday.

The information below is derived from data submitted to the Estimize.com platform by a set of Buy Side and Independent analyst contributors.

The current Wall Street consensus expectation is for Starbucks to report 56c EPS and $3.970B revenue while the current Estimize.com consensus from 40 Buy Side and Independent contributing analysts is 57c EPS and $3.970B in revenue. This quarter the buy-side as represented by the Estimize.com community is expecting Starbucks to beat the Wall Street consensus by a penny on EPS and report in-line on revenue.

Over the previous 6 quarters the consensus from Estimize.com has been more accurate than Wall Street in forecasting Starbucks’ EPS and revenue 3 times each. By tapping into a wider range of contributors including hedge-fund analysts, asset managers, independent research shops, students, and non professional investors Estimize has created a data set that is more accurate than Wall Street up to 69.5% of the time, but more importantly it does a better job of representing the market’s actual expectations. It has been confirmed by Deutsche Bank Quant. Research and an independent academic study from Rice University that stock prices tend to react with a more strongly associated degree to the expectation benchmark from Estimize than from the Wall Street consensus.

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 are seeing almost no difference between the two groups’ expectations.