Some people have already written off this earnings season as a non-event, with numbers from before the trade war becoming meaningless as figments from a vanished world. They have a bit of a point.

But most earnings reports also contain some element of guidance, which in turn reflects executives’ best sense of how the trade war will affect their operations. They know where they source components and raw materials. And they know their target markets.

Add it all up and they have the most accurate perspective we have on where their numbers are going right now and in the future. That guidance has cooled significantly in the last couple of months, which we would expect with major tariff shocks entering into the calculations.

As of this week, that inside outlook points to roughly 10% higher earnings for the S&P 500 this year than what we saw last year, when there was no trade war. That’s obviously a long, long way from a catastrophic earnings collapse like many of us experienced in 2008.

And a 10% growth rate is pretty good in the grand scheme of things . . . close to formal “boom” territory. Again, this lines up with what CEOs and CFOs are telling us. If they’re right, it’s going to be a pretty good year.

If they’re wrong, they’ll suffer in the eyes of shareholders, which is why they tend to cut guidance at first sign of trouble. Yet this season, a month after “liberation day” launched the trade war, about half of the outlook revisions are actually positive. They’re going UP.

Nobody raises guidance unless they think they can hit that revised target. You need real confidence to do that. Evidently half of the CEOs who have made revisions so far this season have that confidence, in the face of tariffs and everything.

Even the negative announcements aren’t enough to drive the overall earnings climate out of “boom” mode. Granted, we were anticipating ultra-hot 15% EPS growth when the year started. Tariffs and reality conspired to take 5 points of that away.

But if we end up with 10% growth this year across the market, I suspect a lot of investors will be cheering. Executives are resilient and agile. I think they have this.