Coming Week: Earnings Torrent

With an onslaught of earnings reports over the next five sessions, headlined by more than a quarter of all S&P 500 companies, the coming week looks to be one of the busiest of this second-quarter reporting season.

While the handful of financial reports in the previous week helped push the S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow Jones Industrial Average higher, market observers caution that the incoming torrent of releases may not act as a strong enough catalyst for the market to push through overhead resistance.

During the previous week, the major U.S. stock averages jumped roughly 7% each on key earnings reports from several financial companies, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM Quote) and Citigroup (C Quote), as well as tech giants Intel(INTC Quote) and IBM(IBM Quote).

Through Friday, 55 companies in the S&P 500 Index had reported earnings for the second quarter, with 71% reporting earnings above analyst expectations. Since 1994, 61% of companies beat estimates in a typical quarter, according to John Butters, a research analyst with Thomson Reuters. The outperformance of financial earnings in the last week helped increase the expected growth rate for S&P 500 companies to -35.2% from -35.7%, he said. ...