A packed news cycle has a lot of investors on edge. I get it. But in my experience, flinching from every hypothetical shock practically ensures that you’ll miss out on a lot of opportunities, even if you’re not a “trader” looking to sell out ahead of periods when stocks underperform or even go down.

After all, most of the nightmare scenarios we can imagine simply don’t come true, and the ones that happen are rarely as bad as the worst projections suggest. Unless you can’t roll with a few rumors, you’ll find it challenging to reach for the upside.

And we’re in luck because there’s one news cycle we can always anticipate and the next one starts in a few weeks when the big banks start to release their quarterly numbers. Unlike all the speculation about trade policy or taxes, for example, earnings season is a scheduled event.

We can all see it coming. Most of the bigger companies let us know weeks in advance when exactly to expect the numbers. They also provide some sense of what to expect from the numbers, which is all “guidance” really means. Of course this advance glimpse at how the cash is flowing is not official or perfectly accurate, but it’s the best sense the executives running the operation have of where the trends point.

While that logic might seem intuitive and even basic on the surface, it’s worth letting it sink in through all the anxious chatter currently choking the market. Guidance gives us a pretty good sense of earnings, revenue and other key metrics for the current quarter and often the full fiscal year as well. At the very least, it’s as good as the numbers the executives see every day as they guide the business around short-term threats toward long-term goals. When something emerges as a real risk factor, they’ll mention that they’re watching it. If they don’t volunteer that information, odds are extremely good that one or more of the analysts on the conference call will raise the question.

Those risk factors are built into every company’s projections. When emergent threats have a material negative impact on those projections, a smart management team will acknowledge the pain early and warn Wall Street that the corporate sky has gotten cloudy. Normally somewhere between 55 and 65 members of the S&P 500 will issue this kind of warning at this phase of the quarterly cycle. We’re currently tracking 66, which is only a fraction above average. Needless to say, “average” means normal. It isn’t elevated. It isn’t extreme.

Don’t get us wrong: those warnings have a cumulative chilling effect. Our sense of earnings growth across the S&P 500 for the full year (2025) has come down about 3 percentage points in the last two months, which is roughly when the warnings started stacking up. Revenue growth is coming on 1/2 percentage point lower. This does not suggest that either the top or bottom line for America’s corporate giants is going down, only that it is rising a little less fast than we hoped.

All in all, we are still looking for 11% more profit this year than last year and well above 5% higher sales numbers as well. Does that look like a looming crash to you? Remember, executives play a challenging game: when they guide our expectations lower, their stocks go down in the short term, but if they don’t warn us at all, the stocks drop hard when we get the results. That’s when the real “shocks” that matter happen.

We don’t buy the S&P 500 as a whole, so all these numbers are really only relevant when it comes to gauging the overall market’s mood. So who is feeling the chill? Materials producers are hurting hard. We don’t recommend them. Tesla is hurting hard, with growth forecasts dropping as sales and sentiment falter. We don’t recommend them right now either. The Industrials are reeling. Not a lot of that in our portfolios. Walmart warns? We don’t cover it.

What we like (and what we overweight) is growth at the right price. That means a lot of technology, a handful of finance and communications companies that effectively double as tech, and a surprising amount of healthcare. Healthcare is booming, with earnings across the sector on track to expand 18-19% this year, right in line with traditional tech. Some of these stocks  have rallied so hard that they’ve gotten ahead of their realistic growth curves, but others have the dynamism to validate their valuations.

Here’s the basic barometer: the S&P 500 might give us 11% growth this year and trades at 20X forward earnings. While that’s not great by historical standards, it gives you a sense of what a vanilla “stocks investor” would get in an index fund right now. Across the tech sector, that growth rate might come in around 19% and Wall Street is paying 25X for that accelerated trajectory.

Again, not great calculations by historical standards (back in the E.F. Hutton era, tech would need to drop another 25% or so to qualify as a screaming buy) but not exactly bad enough to dump existing positions and start over. We’d call it a “hold” at worst. Healthcare looks much better at 18% growth and 17X forward earnings.

Growth isn’t everything, either. We have always preferred some sectors and industries (real estate, higher-yield financials and sometimes energy) because they satisfy different investment criteria, the main one being the ability to lock in decent current income as the dividends accrue. Energy, as you know, is a boom-and-bust cycle. Right now these stocks are far out of favor with earnings stalled this year, but management feels comfortable forecasting 17-18% growth next year and we find no reason to disagree.

At that point, energy will be expanding faster than tech. Investors who buy that story now at barely 14X current earnings will feel pretty smug in that scenario. That’s exactly how all of this works. Buy clarity, don’t flinch until it’s clear that the bad headlines are actually headed into your lane.