Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Q1 Earnings: What's In Store?

Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (NYSE:ICE) will release first-quarter 2017 results on May 3, before the market opens. Last quarter, the company posted a positive earnings surprise of 2.90%. Let’s see how things are shaping up for this announcement.

Factors to Influence Q1 Results

Intercontinental Exchange is expected to have benefited from continued growth and its return-oriented business. Strategic initiatives across markets, listings, data and clearing as well as acquisitions should add to the upside.

Quarterly results of Intercontinental Exchange should benefit from improved average daily volume.

Results should also be supported by the company’s strength in recurring market data revenues.

The company is likely to have realized synergies from acquired data businesses.

Increased share buybacks should provide additional boost to the bottom line.

Adjusted operating expenses are likely to have increased owing to a rise in product launches, technology upgrade as well as higher debt and integration expenses, rebates and compensation and benefits expenses.

Earnings Whispers

Our proven model does not conclusively show that Intercontinental Exchange is likely to beat on earnings this quarter. This is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold) for this to happen. That is not the case here as you will see below.

Zacks ESP: Intercontinental Exchange has an Earnings ESP of 0.00%. This is because both the Most Accurate estimate and the Zacks Consensus Estimate stand at 73 cents. You can uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before they’re reported with our Earnings ESP Filter

Zacks Rank: Intercontinental Exchange carries a Zacks Rank #3. Though a favorable Zacks Rank increases the predictive power of ESP, we need a positive Earnings ESP to be confident about an earnings beat.

Conversely, we caution against Sell-rated stocks (Zacks Rank #4 or 5) going into the earnings announcement, especially when the company is seeing negative estimate revisions.

Stocks to Consider

Here are some companies from the finance sector that you may want to consider as these have the right combination of elements to post an earnings beat this quarter:

Prudential Financial Inc. (NYSE:PRU) , which is set to report first-quarter earnings on May 3, has an Earnings ESP of +0.38% and a Zacks Rank #3. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

American Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE:AFG) has an Earnings ESP of +0.73% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is slated to report first-quarter earnings on May 3.

AerCap Holdings N.V (NYSE:AER) has an Earnings ESP of +2.13% and a Zacks Rank #3. The company is set to report first-quarter earnings on May 9.

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