Guidance Raises minus Cuts · S&P 500 (net share, 90 days)

## What this measures

Of the quantitative guidance updates S&P 500 companies made in their earnings releases over the trailing 90 days, the share that raised the outlook minus the share that lowered or withdrew it, in percentage points. It counts revenue, earnings-per-share, margin, free-cash-flow and EBITDA guidance. A value of +20 means raises outnumbered cuts by twenty points of all updates.

## Why it matters

Guidance is the company's own forecast, issued by the people who see the order book. When raises outrun cuts, managements are seeing more demand or better costs than they expected a quarter ago; when cuts spread, the reverse. It moves before the earnings it describes are reported.

## How to read it

Above zero, more companies are raising than cutting; below zero, the balance has turned. Read the direction over several weeks, since earnings season bunches the updates into a few weeks each quarter. Compare it with the Discourse sentiment series to see whether the numbers and the tone agree.

## What it does not say

It counts statements, not dollars, so a company that guides many figures weighs more than one that guides a single number, and a small company's cut weighs the same as a large one's. It covers only guidance given as numbers in the 8-K earnings release; guidance given only on the call, or only in words, is outside it. New guidance with no earlier figure to compare is excluded, and so are tax rates, costs, share counts and capital spending, where a higher figure is not a better outlook.

## Source

Palanor Guidance Ledger, built from SEC EDGAR 8-K Item 2.02 filings (Exhibit 99.1), which are public domain. Each statement is extracted by a language model into a fixed schema, then verified: its quote must appear verbatim in the filing, its numbers must appear in the quote, and its period must fit the company's fiscal calendar from XBRL. Unverified statements are excluded. A statement's direction is computed against the company's previous figure for the same metric and period, or taken from the release when it states the change. Recomputed by /api/cron/guidance-sync. Derived by Palanor.

## Revision — 2026-09-26

Universe updated to current S&P 500 constituents (8 out, 3 in). Out: Builders FirstSource, Molson Coors and The Trade Desk, which left the index on 21 September 2026; Electronic Arts, which was taken private and left on 5 August 2026; and MongoDB, Cloudflare, Snowflake and Zoom, which were never members and had been included in error since May 2026. In: Bloom Energy, Everpure and Illumina, which joined on 21 September 2026. Membership now comes from a dated constituent list refreshed monthly. The corrected list applies from 26 September 2026. Readings before that date are unchanged.