Weekend Wrap: Three lessons from reporting season

Hi there!

Reporting season is over and I’m all out of brain juice.

At the sector level, it was a fairly uneventful one outside of a healthcare revival and miners absolutely printing cash (1-month sector and index performances above). Share price volatility is the new norm and ~10% moves are now extremely common.

Here are my biggest takeaways from this earnings season.

• Don’t underestimate the trend. The S&P/ASX 200 Healthcare sector was already up 28% from its 3 June low heading into the CSL and Cochlear results, against a backdrop of a strongly trending S&P 500 Healthcare Index at record highs. Both local heavyweights beat earnings and guidance expectations, and the sector has run another 11% since.

• Miners are printing cash. Miner results are usually uneventful, since most of the data lands at the prior quarterly. Not this time. It felt like every miner had surprises regarding capital management. Sandfire declared its first dividend since 2022 (US 22.8 cents, 34% ahead of Macquarie’s US 17 cents), Aurelia Metals a maiden 1 cps payout against expectations of nil, and Alkane its first capital return ever at 2 cps plus a $50 million buyback. And many, many more. With commodity prices holding up, it’s prime harvesting time.

• Listen to the peers. Westpac was one of the first banks to flag the slowdown, with its 3Q26 update on 10 August showing average monthly mortgage application volumes down 11% quarter-on-quarter and the post-budget run rate down 20% on 2Q26. It wasn’t a good look, and pretty much every other major bank echoed it. The S&P/ASX 200 Financials Index fell 2.2% on the day of the Westpac update and is down a further 6.2% since.

A fairly light one for this week. Let’s dive in.