Guidance
A company's forecast of its future sales or profits. Stocks often move more on guidance than on past results.
In the news
How “guidance” came up in recent issues.
- Oct 23Tech stocks slid on AI spending worries, and phones cost more
“That outlook is called guidance: a company's own forecast of how it will do next.”
- Oct 21Netflix earned more than expected, but its stock still fell
“GM narrowed its full-year guidance, the profit forecast a company gives investors, but kept the middle of the range at $15 billion, so it didn't raise expectations.”
Learn the bigger idea
Related words
- Stock
- A small slice of ownership in a company. One unit is called a share.
- S&P 500
- A stock market index that tracks about 500 of the biggest U.S. companies. It's the most common way to measure how the market did.
- Dow Jones Industrial Average
- A stock market index that tracks 30 large U.S. companies.
- Nasdaq Composite
- A stock market index of the thousands of companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange. It leans heavily toward tech companies.
- Earnings per share
- A company's profit divided by its number of shares. Wall Street compares it with what analysts expected.
- Revenue
- All the money a company brings in from sales, before any costs are taken out.
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